


but i didn't do it right (can i try again?)

by scumfucklesbian



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adopted Children, Alternate Universe - Bakery, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Angst with a Happy Ending, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Friends to Lovers, Getting Back Together, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, also maura and aurora are dating because i say so, baker! aurora, baker! ronan, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21648583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scumfucklesbian/pseuds/scumfucklesbian
Summary: “I’m taking a break from work, thought I’d drop by Henrietta for a week or two,” Adam muttered, tapping his fingers against his knees like he used to on Ronan’s thigh under cafeteria tables, “And it’s been too long since I’ve been home.”(Ronan has been harbouring a crush on the employee of his mother's bakery for years.Eleven years later, he returns, causing Ronan's life that he built with an Adam Parrish shaped hole to collapse.)
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 116
Kudos: 268





	1. it's funny how i still forgot

**Author's Note:**

> another niche au about ronan and adam being tender? but this time with warm food as a love language? more likely than you think

“Boss, someone’s callin’ for you”

Ronan looked up from his desk, eyes strained and tired from sitting in his stupid business chair all day, to see Blue Sargent dripping soap suds all over his office carpet. Either she didn’t notice or she didn’t care, it didn’t lift up Ronan’s mood either way. He groaned, dropping his head in his palms and stretching his fucked up spine. 

Ronan, who was irritable most times, definitely didn’t need any more shit on his plate today. Not when Declan was on his ass about finances and business was slow and Opal needed Ronan to meet her teachers on Sunday because she couldn't keep her filthy mouth shut (even though she had inherited her vocabulary from him). He was a mess and he detested whoever was outside right now for making his life a living hell.

“Who?”

Blue, as unhelpful and uncaring as ever, shrugged flippantly. “Didn’t ask for his name,” she gives him an accusing look with her eyes squinted like a fruit bat in sunlight, “But just to be clear, I call dibs first.”

Ronan rolls his eyes in reply, secretly delighted for an excuse to ignore his responsibilities while also developing a migraine from trying to guess who had came to ruin his day. The landlord, an angry middle-aged customer, his eldest brother. They were all horrible options for him to deal with right now while he was two seconds away from punching a hole into the wall.

The stranger in the middle of his cafe isn’t anyone he’s expecting.

Walking out of his office, Ronan sees a crowd of his workers gathering behind the register, peering over the counter to stare at _something_ . He hears Matthews laughter as he blocks _whoever_ he’s talking to. So someone non-threatening at least.

Ronan, confused as all hell at 11 pm, was too stunned to scold his employees for slacking and clowning around during their shifts. “What are you assholes up to?”

Henry shushes him, only annoying Ronan further. Noah shrugs in apology for his boyfriend’s behaviour before going back to ogling like a small child at his first time at the zoo. “A greek god maybe,” Blue smirks and Ronan knows better than to trust her.

“There he is!” Matthew shouts, too loudly for the bakery. Ronan doesn’t have the mental energy to get mad at him for causing a scene in front of their (two) patrons, his mouthing going dry as Matthew shifts in his seat to beacon Ronan over.

His spine jolts when the stranger raises his gaze to look up at Ronan, eyes still crinkled in the corners mid-laugh from whatever Matthew said previously. Ronan tried not to notice the way the man’s lips part, tries not to panic when he gets up from his seat and makes his way to them.

Tries not to be delighted by the attention.

His crew scampers away, retreating to their various stations like the traitors they were. Ronan swallowed nervously, trying to force his brain to take the entirety of the stranger in his mind.

“Hey, Lynch,” he mutters, the ghost of a dimple on his face. And that was the last straw.

Ronan melts like a fucking damsel.

He tries to collect himself, setting his face into stone and closing off all his emotions. Going for intimidation instead of awestruck. Lynches were notorious for their safety techniques, and Ronan was a master at bringing out his talons to bury all emotions that weren’t blinding fury or unstoppable anger.

And it’s not as if Ronan hasn’t had attractive customers before.

Weekly, eligible men in business suits and boyish college students walk into the door. But none of them had made Ronan react like this before, out of breath and holy, ready to beg any god for a chance of desecration. He had ruined Ronan before Ronan even knew his name, the catholic guilt surfacing again. Ronan’s heart always won the war, giving in as he keeps his eyes trained on the stranger’s eyelashes.

This man right here looked worn out in the most charming way possible, rustic and faded, like a painting in the Lourve. His dirty autumn hair and freckles screamed southern raised. The ghost of a dimple, a faded tan, straight teeth. Looking like a soldier in the civil war.

He was so Ronan’s type it was kind of unfair.

Ronan choked as he tried to return a greeting, steadying himself on the counter. The man furrows his brows in concern as Ronan coughed his lungs out, embarrassed for himself and his semi-stoic reputation.

“See, Adam? I told you he was still weird,” Matthew said from behind them and the man makes a sound of agreement.

Ronan’s stomach falls out of place.

He blinks, looking at the stranger again as his heart beats wildly behind his ribcage. Trying desperately to recollect ever bittersweet memory from his youth that features a gaunt-looking Adam Parrish and his clumsy Henrietta accent, trying to piece that boy with the handsome man that stood before him.

“Parrish?” Ronan asks, an orchestra in his ears as snapshot after snapshot of summers spent sleeping under the same bedsheets, socked toes pressed together in silent confessions, flooded him to the point of drowning.

He looked different, sounded different. His hair was cut evenly now, his smile less restraint and painful, the lilt of an accent that used to make Ronan giddy in the morning almost completely masked. 

But his freckles were mapped in the same place, his hands with their handsome knuckles and familiar callouses still fidgetting. There was no denying it, Ronan’s body still lurches for him like home. A childhood sepia photograph, living and breathing before him. Ronan held his breath.

“Yeah, loser, it’s me,” he says with such fondness, his eyes soften and calm like the ocean tempting Ronan to jump in, that it was _really unfair_. 

Ronan wanted to scream in his face to get out. Every emotion he’s had for the other boy since he was fifteen rushing back again like a waterfall, including wanting to kiss his stupid face into oblivion. He wanted to hurt him, with sharp words but never fists. He wanted to touch him again after eleven years, nails scratching and brushes to his cheek. Colliding like comets in space.

Adam goes in for a friendly hug, Ronan freezes up.

Adam Parrish was Ronan Lynch’s first crush.

Most people, after finding out Ronan’s sexual preference, would assume Gansey, Ronan’s first childhood friend aside from his brothers, was his first crush. 

His brother certainly thought so (a huge dick), so did his classmates (even worse dicks) and even his parents felt the same way at some point. 

They weren’t exactly wrong, Ronan did think Gansey was pretty from the tender ages of nine to twelve, but whatever repressed fleeting attraction he had for Gansey didn’t hold a flame to the inferno Adam lighted in him.

Puberty was a confusing time for Ronan, an awful nightmare that got him into the world of destructive street racing, self desecration of his nimble body, and drinking himself to oblivion. Living became a war that almost seemed too bleak to keep fighting for.

The worst part of it was, on top of all the trauma and grief and changing bodies and newfound confusing attraction to other boys, Ronan was forced to share a bed for years with the most beautiful boy he’s ever met.

The year he meets Adam Parrish is the year his father, renowned chef and restaurant owner Nial Lynch, was murdered.

Aurora, a respected local bakery owner and mother to the Lynch brothers, taught Ronan food was a love language, her soft singing as she kneaded dough the only love Ronan believed actually existed. 

She also had a habit of picking up strays, as evident from the cats that roamed the barns of Ronan’s childhood farm, even when she’s suffering and at her lowest.

Adam was undoubtedly Ronan’s least and most favourite of his mother’s strays.

Ronan remembers seeing him in the bakery for the first time, sitting in the corner and dirty with car grease in overly large coveralls for his scrawny body. He looked pitiful, gathering scraps of his sale price muffin, but Ronan was too full of anger and sadness to feel anything but seething apathy to the pretty boy he saw around in the school hallways sometimes. 

He vaguely remembers the way Gansey worshipped the new boy from Mountain View, spewing constantly about his brilliance. Ronan, unfortunately, was too busy ruining himself to feel anything but jealousy.

Just the presence of him made Ronan fidget, an itch just waiting to be scratched. It was something to do with his uncanny face, the deep bags under his eyes that made him look like an angelised corpse. His eyes attentive, Ronan felt like the creepy shit could see all the secrets buried inside of him.

In a busy cafe full of people, Ronan would always search for only him.

He doesn’t talk to Adam once the whole two months Adam comes and goes into the bakery during his lunch break. Still, Ronan memorises his work schedule, waiting with hidden excitement for the bell to ring above the door and have Adam show up smelling like cheap gasoline.

Apparently, Ronan wasn’t the only one to notice the worn-out looking ragdoll boy that came every once in a while just to order a quarter of a pastry because one day Ronan walked in to help his mom out in the kitchen, only to see Adam in an apron and sweeping the floors.

His mother came in, always whistling under her breath, a stack of eggs in her arms, telling him to play nice because Adam was working in exchange for free lunches from now on.

Ronan was, predictably, pissed.

Looking back, Ronan was angry for reasons he didn’t fully understand himself. He was never mad at his mom for forcing him to spend time with a schoolmate or for helping out a boy who clearly needed it. He was angry for a secret he couldn’t even admit to himself at the time.

Being close to Adam was torture not because Ronan hated him.

It was torture because Ronan couldn’t hate him.

He was beautiful and quiet, working silently and sucking all the air in the room like a cosmic deity. The timber way he carried himself, hunched over and crooked even with his pride. He was enigmatic and Ronan rarely got any work done when he shared a shift with the other boy.

He was content from watching from afar under the pretence he hated Adam’s guts, a safety technique he learned to keep Declan from fussing over him as he grieved his father the only way he knew how, with stolen beer and painful ink needles.

Adam pretended he didn’t exist and Ronan pretended he wished Adam didn’t exist. The truth had always been, Adam Parrish was the sun he orbited around.

This was a silent agreement between them, never to interact. Ronan’s heart would lurch at the sight of Adam’s pretty hands covered in food colouring like galaxies, and he would bite down the urge to clean off the watercolour with his tongue.

Occasionally Ronan would break the rule and snipe about Adam’s clothes, and Adam would spit an insult back with his equally sharp tongue. Adam would call Ronan’s friends stupid as he dried the metal bowls while Ronan playfull tripped Adam as he whisked icing. Those were the worst parts, a glimpse of something Ronan desperately wanted but wouldn’t allow himself to have.

Another month of dancing around and avoiding each other for the most part, Ronan’s entire universe changes one night when he answers the door to find Adam Parrish hunched over and coughing blood.

Ronan screamed for his mother.

Unresponsive, Adam wouldn’t say why he was at their doorstep that night. Aurora, worried out of her mind and desperately trying to coddle Matthew, watched carefully as Ronan tended to the bruises littering Adam’s fragile slender body. He kept his jaw clasped shut and Ronan never pushed.

They slept in the same bed for the first time.

Adam doesn’t leave the barns until a week has passed.

That week, a joyous, awful week. The most memorable, miserable week Ronan had to suffer through since the weekend he found his father’s deformed body in the drive way.

A whole week of eating breakfast next to Adam Parrish and hearing him laugh like an angel at Ronan’s bad jokes, running around together in wheat fields and petting cows, wrestling in lakes without shirts on, sleeping with their backs pressed together.

They caught fireflies together one night with his brothers, Aurora on the porch looking at the moon. Ronan remembers the way the tiny bug had illuminated half of Adam’s blinding grin like soft sunlight even through the glass jar. The way Adam’s face had scrunched up in unhidden joy. Remembers the way his mouth buzzed with the need to kiss him.

Remembers thinking he was truly fucked.

There was no going back after that. Ronan was truly gone, fallen into the deep end of the swimming pool that was his childhood crush for Adam Parrish.

They predictably become close friends after that. It was impossible not to memorise the breathing pattern of someone’s chest when they slept and not at least be friends. Sharing everything, completely tethered to each other.

Ronan spent three years falling in love with Adam Parrish more and more every day.

He remembers warm summer nights of Adam sleeping next to him, both of their breathing uneven and too loud with gnats buzzing loudly outside Ronan’s bedroom window.

Days of loitering around the bakery, sitting on countertops despite his mother’s protests, just to watch Adam calmly sweep the fallen ingredients off the floor. To watch him openly in the sunlight streaming in, swaying and completely vulnerable.

Tying up Adam’s apron, hands lingering too long at the dip of his waist. Hands brushing in the walk-in refrigerator. Elbows kissing as they whisked frosting next to each other, laughing like boys do.

Amidst the new back tattoos that didn’t hurt half as much as losing his dad and hurting his mother, contorting himself to look like a walking warning sign, and new permanent snarl, Adam was the only soft thing he accepted willingly.

Adam himself was prickly. His mother joked that he was like cactus, a shy grin on his face whenever she teased him. Closed off and separated, like an idyllic creature isolated from the rest of the world. 

Ronan never asked why he was so cagey, but he knew well enough, the cuts and bruises all over the other boy’s body said enough. The weekends he refused to go home. The days of complete silence afterwards. The way he flinched at doors being slammed.

To get close to Adam required patience and oven mitts, neither of which Ronan had any of naturally.

To get close to Ronan required thick skin and a fireproof suit, which Adam didn’t have either.

It was a miracle they could stand each other.

_Ronan loved him. Ronan loved him. Ronan loved him._

Ronan cried twice in his mother’s arms. Once after his father’s funeral. The other the day Adam left for Harvard without saying goodbye.

Seeing him again in the bakery they grew up in felt like a punch to the throat, awful and terrible. Butterflies already spreading their wings, ready for take-off to infest Ronan’s stomach. 

“Damn four years at an ivy league and you still eat like a slob.”

Adam flips him off with one hand, the other using his shirt sleeve to wipe at his mouth. Ronan smirks, watching smugly as the boy of his dreams enjoy his very own apple pie, mouth stuffed and eyes shut in bliss. Even after all these years, Ronan still remembers his favourite.

He had closed up the bakery, all his nosey workers already sent home (with a glare from most of them), and his cafe empty. An intimate privacy. The love of attention all focused on Adam.

Now it raged with rain outside, the streetlight and one ceiling light still turned on the only form of illumination that quiet night. Adam hummed in satisfaction, Ronan burned with heat.

Ronan leans in, elbows on his knees, watching Adam carefully. Like a daydream, Ronan still couldn’t believe he was here right in front of him. Since laying his eyes on him, Ronan feels like he’s been sleepwalking.

“Why are you even fucking doing here, Parrish?”

Adam swallows, taking a big gulp of orange juice Ronan had left on his table, the same brand Aurora would pour out for breakfast at the barns. It wasn’t awkward between them, not when Ronan’s arms were sculpted to fit Adam Parrish in the empty space and Adam had already set up a village in Ronan’s heart. They weren’t exactly shy or restricted. But it was strange not to banter and tease between sentences. 

Hope filled Ronan like a drain that Adam would stay long enough for them to grow accustomed to each other again. His fingers missed the texture of Adam’s hay-coloured hair, a faint buzz of lightning underneath his skin when they touch knees.

“I’m taking a break from work, thought I’d drop by Henrietta for a week or two,” Adam muttered, tapping his fingers against his knees like he used to on Ronan’s thigh under cafeteria tables, “And it’s been too long since I’ve been home.”

_Please don’t do this to me_ , Ronan prayed to the peeling ceiling paint.

Ronan agreed, grunting as he stole a bite of pie off Adam’s plate after snatching Adam’s fork. Eleven years was a whole lifetime of being apart, a torturous wound as deep as the distance that separated Adam Parrish from Ronan Lynch.

Adam made a sound of protest. Ronan bit hard on the metal, letting the sugar dissolve on his tongue to sweeten the bitterness that currently raged inside him.

It wasn’t fair Adam had to come back and destroy him like the first time.

Eleven years of waiting for a phone call or a letter or anything. Eleven years of radio silence from Boston. Eleven years of being in pain.

Ronan was suddenly the same angry teenage boy he was eleven years ago, terrified and in love with a boy so above him he was untouchable and unattainable. 

Adam Parrish in the flesh after eleven years of hating his guts and loving him from afar.

Ronan blinks. He opens his eyes. Adam was still there, with his infuriating handsome face and concern that Ronan still felt he didn’t deserve to feel.

“Why now”

It sounded more like an accusation than a question leaving Ronan’s lips, venom harboured over his twenties towards Adam filling his words. He watches Adam flinch, feeling fleeting satisfaction and lingering guilt. A much younger Ronan Lynch would’ve exploded with rage by now, a hurricane of turning tables and harmful swears.

Adam is speechless. Guilty-looking and mortified as he hunched over his plate. They both knew what Ronan was thinking. It was easier to rip off the bandage now.

Adam leaving Ronan behind, despite promising to never do just that was a very _very_ scummy thing to do.

Ronan still wasn’t ready for the conversation on why Adam left so hastily yet.

The street light flickers like a fallen angel’s halo. In the brief darkness, Ronan imagines them as boys sitting in the same position they were now in the present. Ronan would speak with claws and poison, intending only to hurt. Adam, much more vulnerable and prideful than he lets on, would return in kind. They would destroy each other and crawl in the same bed at the end of the night.

The stranger in front of him with the mask of his friend, doesn’t look like the type to put with Ronan’s shit like the younger Adam would have. He looks like the grown and mature adult man with a strong jaw and broader shoulders that would simply walk away forever without a fight if Ronan asked him to.

Ronan doesn’t want to lose him again, he bites down on his tongue and tries to rip open the cemetery gate in his heart open for Adam again.

“You could’ve at least called,” Ronan huffed, still hurt like a rejected dog, “would it fucking hurt you to just call me _once_.”

“I know, I’m sorry”

It wasn’t enough but Ronan felt himself surrendering. Adam looked up with his head still hung low, the sincerity in his gaze an awful thing Ronan still prayed to. He was a tyrant but he could never disown his object of worship, no matter how many years pass by in punishment. 

The shell of his love for Adam Parrish had never been discarded, Ronan simply put it aside for safekeeping, waiting with hopelessness for Adam to fill it up again.

“I missed your voice,” Ronan confesses.

“I’m sorry, I miss you,” Adam returns. Ronan wants to curl his hands into fists only to stroke his freckled cheek.

“God, fuck you, Parrish,” Ronan groaned, wiping his face with his hand as he dumped the empty plate into the sink. Collecting his thoughts and making his smoker breath, he turns away from Adam, hunched over the sink in defeat.

He hears Adam’s breathing, the remorse radiating off the other man suffocating. Knowing he’ll hate himself the next morning, Ronan grunted. “Do you have a place to stay tonight?”


	2. i could stare at your back all day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> domesticity and longing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was listening to lay me down by sam smith while writing this so :) also unedited for now because its 2 am and i have work lmao

On the drive back to his apartment, Ronan learns that Adam had detoured to Henrietta on impulse and hadn’t booked a room somewhere beforehand, planning on being spontaneous and dealing with housing arrangements when it posed a problem.

Ronan didn’t know whether to be impressed, Adam the meticulous planner was stepping out of line, or pissed off it had taken him this long to finally grow a pair.

“So you don’t live at the barns any more?”

Ronan grunts in reply, a stubborn part of him still refusing to meet eye to eye with Adam. Adam nodded, tapping his blunt nails against the car seat, a rhythm more akin to a pulse than the thumping music that came from Ronan’s stereo.

It was hard to focus on the road.

From the corner of his eyes, Ronan stole glances of Adam peering out the car window as buildings whizzed by. The interior a vacuum of sound, echoing the sound of his own pulse. Fluctuating like sea tides, Ronan felt stuck in time.

Fifteen years ago, the passenger seat of the charcoal grey beemer was Ronan’s throne, watching in awe as his father shifted the gear stick over country roads. Eleven years ago, the passenger seat of Ronan’s BMW was reserved primarily for Adam Parrish.

Home was the Barns, home was also the leather seats inside an inherited coupe car. Home was smoking blunts with Noah and Gansey at abandoned strip malls. Home was Adam Parrish’s hair pressed flat against his car windows.

Adam’s presence demanded Ronan’s attention. Like a magnet, impatient and relentless when begging for worship.

He hears Adam sigh, imagines the fog of his warm breath on the cool glass and against his neck. The moon follows them like an old friend, warning Ronan not to combust. Like a child, Ronan swears at the moon, angry at everything on and off the earth. 

Adam doesn’t talk to him. He doesn’t have to. Throughout the entire drive, Ronan felt like he was sober for the first time, the awareness to everything a low hum torture. He could feel the peeling leather under his palms, the engine's orchestra and the exact dent Adam had chosen to rest his elbow on. For a duration of a song or two, Ronan felt alive and real.

It was all too Richard Siken for his taste.

  
Cutting the engine feels like rebirth. Ronan pulls out an emergency flask from the glove compartment (which never stored gloves for as long as any Lynch could remember), ignoring the look Adam gives him from his seat. This was his desperate baptism.

The house he lives in now feels like a slice of the Barns, compact and made to live in. Adam whistles, an impressed sound, as he removes his shoes by the doorway like Aurora taught him to.

Burns on countertops from hot pans, water stains on the carpet, scruffs on the wood. It was a place meant to be used and destroyed, Ronan didn’t ache to be away from the Barns when he managed to store love in a place far from it.

The reason why Ronan moved in the first place comes barreling into the doorway the moment she hears the sound of keys, a flurry of blonde hair and clumsy limbs crashing into Adam who only makes a surprised sound from his throat.

“KERAH,” She shouts like a bird, intimidating the raven Ronan kept at the Barns. Ronan rolls his eyes, watching the way she was already sucking up to Adam. “You’re _fucking_ late again”

Opal Lynch wasn’t any less Lynch than any of them were. She was untameable, a livid wildfire that stretched the whole of Virginia, inherited from Ronan himself. Her sharp snarl from Niall and honeycomb hair from Aurora. The only telling mark she wasn’t another Lynch sibling was the brown eyes.

Every Lynch had blue eyes. It’s been highlighted to Ronan many times, usually through the newspaper articles he read about his father as a substitution for his empty presence at home. Adam knew this, knew the Lynches too well for Ronan’s comfort, and knelt down to take a better look at her.

Ronan felt like he was cutting up his chest open for examination.

“Another one of your mom’s strays?” Adam asked, voice dripping with amusement as Opal the traitor clung to Ronan’s ankle instead. 

She chattered, Adam giving her attention willingly. Ronan made a strangled sound as Adam bursts with short huffs of laughter everytime Opal mumbled around the word _fuck_. He knew responsibly, he should’ve stopped swearing at home the day he brought Opal back in a tiny bundle of cloth. He figured she was going to learn anyways from school, it was easier getting the phase over with.

She grinned, all crooked teeth, up at Adam. He returns the favour, a stray acknowledging another stray in a language Ronan would never be able to translate. A horrible twist occurs behind Ronan’s lung.

“No this one’s mine,” Ronan grunted, pulling her off the ground by the armpits. She squirms from being tickled, squealing in delight like a newborn lamb. “Oh don’t look so smug.”

Adam was leaning against the coffee table, looking the least put together Ronan had seen him all day. His sleeves pushed up above his elbows and buttons undone, Ronan had to flicker his gaze away to Opal. She only gives him a smug look in reply. Ronan pulls her skullcap over her eyes.

“I always knew you were the maternal type.”

Ronan covers Opal’s eyes with his palm, giving Adam the bird as he dumped Opal on the couch. The tiny asshole pulls him down with her, Ronan falls willingly without grace, amused by her delighted shrill as the couch bounced with their combined weights.

Adam shook his head, that stupid grin on his lips he tries muffling with his knuckles. It was strange to see him smile so much, openly and around other people, nothing like the terrified kid Ronan knew would. The roundness of his mouth, the easy way he reacted without restraint.

The teenager that lives inside of Ronan, the awful one that used to wax poetry about Adam Parrish’s laugh in his head during Latin, made a racket in his stomach, rearranging his entire digestive system and making him feel sick.

“Shut the fuck up or you’re sleeping on the streets tonight”

Adam clasps his mouth shut, the corner of his lips still tugs upwards. Ronan has to look away.

The Lynch brothers were homeschooled from preschool to second grade.

Almost every morning, a different tutor would come in and teach each brother a different lesson in science and music and literature and anything their father found important to gift to three growing boys.

But his mother taught Ronan things that he thought were always more important than vocabulary and equations. Lessons whispered to his hairline as bedtime stories and poetry that set him on fire.

She told him that love and attention were the same thing.

Adam didn’t have to say it out loud for Ronan to know he never had either before the Lynch family.

He wonders if Adam knew how eager Ronan was willing to eat his heart out for him.

They sat around the shitty Ikea dining table Ronan promptly bought once Aurora found out he had been allowing Opal nightly tv dinners. Adam sat across from him, eyes shut in bliss as he ate the warm spaghetti, getting sauce on his cheek, eating hungrily the way he has since young.

Opal sat between them, an unspoken barrier. It was torture to look directly at the sun but Ronan would rather power through observing Adam from a distance than accidentally brushing elbows and thighs. The more they touched, the more real Adam felt, and the more terrified Ronan got.

Adam cleared his throat, trying to keep up his polite appearance even with his mouth stained red. Opal, who didn’t look any neater, placed a dinosaur-shaped chicken nugget on his plate with her grubby hands. “So, sleeping arrangements?”

Ronan nodded to himself, stealing a nugget from Opal’s plate, who slaps his hand away before trying to stab his fingers with her plastic fork.

“Right, brat sleeps in my bed and you can have her room.”

“I’m too old to share a bed with you,” Opal whines stubbornly, Ronan groans loudly to drown out her voice. His heart reves up like the beemer’s engine, he can feel Adam’s gaze burning a hole into his tank top. The gasoline catches on fire, Ronan clutches tightly onto the table cloth.

Adam raises an eyebrow at the two of them, his stupid mouth pulling upwards.

“It’s fine, I can take the couch.”

“With your fucked up back, old man? I’m not driving you to the ER at fuckass o’ clock”

Ronan wasn’t really sure why he was protesting Adam sleeping in the living room. It was easier this way, Opal appeased to sleep in her own bed and Ronan able to sleep soundly without his heart running around Jupiter in a loop.

But then his stupid head has to play a clip from his teenage years of an overworked Adam Parrish complaining about his sprained back. Attention and love, both awful things Ronan had so much of but not enough people to give them to.

He cared about Adam Parrish, the worst characteristic to have after eleven years.

Opal giggles at Ronan calling Adam old, twisting her tiny body to face Adam with complete seriousness on her face. “Why don’t you sleep in Kerah’s room like all his other boyfriends?"

Adam’s face turns red all the way up to his ears, brushing his hair behind them like it was enough to cover up the tips of his flush.

Ronan kicks his shins under the table in warning. Adam kicks back.

“ _Boyfriends_ huh?”

“Parrish for Christ’s sake, we’re in front of blessings”

Adam rolls his eyes, that stupid fucking grin on his face. Under the kitchen’s orange light, surrounded by things Ronan had to hurt to love, Ronan couldn’t look away.

Ronan knows the cliches.

After watching shitty hallmark movies with Noah, he knows this is the part where he invites Adam into his bed. As easily as he invited Adam back into his life. They’ll share a pillow, his bed will smell like Adam Parrish for the rest of his life and then he’ll suffer in silence when Adam eventually leaves again.

It’s hard to remind himself not to get attached to non-permanent things. Even if the non-permanent thing was sending electric shocks all through Ronan’s nervous system underneath the table.

Ronan was in love with a war.

He coughs into his shoulder, watching the way Opal makes her dinosaurs attack each other. Trying to rip out his claws, Ronan softens his tone for her and himself, “Adam isn’t my boyfriend, pipsqueak.” Then he clears his throat and wishes he had a glass next to his clear water, “But he’s free to sleep in my bed if he wants. Whatever.”

Opal rolls her eyes at him, a gesture that made her look more like Adam’s child than Ronan’s. “Why not?”

Adam shakes his head, serving more spaghetti onto her plate and gracing Ronan from having to explain his complicated love life that always managed to involve Adam Parrish somehow. Ronan mouths a thank you, Adam nods with a shy duck of his head to his collarbone, more boyish than he seemed all night.

“I’d like that, if you’re cool with it.”

Ronan bites his tongue, feeling the warm fabric of Adam’s wool sock crawl up his ankle.

“Why wouldn’t I be, loser.”

“Kerah, huh?” Adam teases, shirt sleeves damp from doing the dishes after insisting he was a guest and Ronan should pull his head out of his ass and just _let me help you with this one thing for fuck's sake_.

“I wasn’t going to let her call me _dad_ , that’s fucking weird.”

Opal laid limp in Ronan’s arms, her dead weight making her heavier but her lack of squirming made her easier to handle. She yawns audibly, mumbling into the crook of Ronan’s neck. Adam helps to guide them tumble into the darkened hallway in the expense of Ronan’s sanity as their fingers brush in a barely hold.

Dinner was too domestic for Ronan. Too close to the family image he imagined on the lonely nights after Adam’s departure.

At eighteen, he never really thought about raising kids. He had farm animals to tend to and sheep to birth and a little brother worth enough trouble for an entire child’s home. But he did daydream about a ring around his finger at night and around a chain in the morning while he was ploughing fields. He imagined warm beds, toothbrushes kept in the same cup, smart Oxford shoes kept beside his worn-out work boots.

The reality was so much worse.

Being forced to watch how well Adam and Opal got along, the easiness between them, set a hole in Ronan’s stomach rotting by the edges. Bile crawls up his throat, tears threatened to escape him. Fantasy so close to something he wanted desperately it was almost cruel.

Adam, ever prudent, helped open the door to Opal's room. Ronan grunted a thanks as he settled her down gently, his little foal looking much more peaceful now that she was sleepy. 

She stutters a goodnight into her pillow and Ronan melts, a split second where ignoring Adam wasn’t a chore. On any other night, Ronan would whisper an Irish lullaby to her forehead, words from Aurora herself. He wasn’t ready to let Adam see that part of him yet. Opal, ever prudent as well, says nothing and gives a final tug to the wristbands that wrap loosely around his wrist.

Ronan flattens her hair gently, trailing down to stroke her cheek with his thumb, and leaves, Adam trailing behind like a lost stranger walking into a painting with a different colour pallet.

“You love her,” Adam says with the same voice he used for rattling off physics answers to the ceiling with Ronan pressed arm to arm next to him. Which is to say he says it more like a statement, like it was fact, than a question.

Ronan neither denies nor answers him, vulnerable and terrified. He raises his wristbands to his mouth, his teeth finding familiar ridges like fossils of his hardships.

Sometimes Ronan forgets that he isn’t the only one who’s memorised Adam Parrish like a bible verse. Forgets that Adam knows him as well as he remembers Adam. 

Adam drops the subject gently, placing an autumn leaf gently on the river water and letting it flow away naturally down to the sea. He knows Ronan won’t say it outloud. Ronan wonders what else he knows Ronan won’t admit even to god.

“Who’s her mom, then?” Adam asks instead, voice barely a whisper over the electric fan buzzing from Ronan’s bedroom.

“Me, asshole,” Ronan deadpanned, “but her only known birth parent was some crackhead named Gwenllian, don’t ask me how we met.” He made sure the room to Opal’s door was shut, before heading on Adam with false courage. He was leaning against the wall with his hands hidden behind him, a magician hiding secrets up his sleeves. Ronan mirrored him. Two horror movie twins face to face against opposite walls in a darkened hallway. “Fled the day the tiny brat was born.”

Ronan wasn’t sure what face he was making right now but it couldn’t be pretty. Adam frowned, a crease between his eyebrows. Ronan eleven years ago would smooth the dent away with his thumb. The Ronan now burns with an urge to hug him.

“How old is she now?”

“Aren’t you chatty tonight, Jimmy Kemmel,” Ronan snipes. Then much more reluctantly, “she’s nine.”

Ronan remembers the day he brought her home to the barns, all dazed and confused, unsure how to hold onto infants and clumsy. 

He was the first one to find out Gwenllian had fled Maura Sargent’s attic. First person to see the miserable baby, still stained red from blood, squirming all alone in a cardboard box, crying in her suffocation hazard. He was the first person to love her and he swore he would be the last.

Barely twenty with so much love to harbour, Ronan refused to give her up to the Fox Way ladies.

Adam nods and Ronan can see the gears working his brain, doing the math of when Opal was born. Ronan wants to give him somewhere to turn off his head, wants to spread his arms and devour Adam whole. Wants to do so with tenderness.

Instead, Ronan knocks his elbows into Adam’s, walking ahead without looking back to see if Adam was following him. “Bed-by time, Benjamin Spock.”

He hears Adam’s feet shuffle across the wooden planks and tries to catalogue it deep inside his heart to miss later on.

Ronan loves his room.

He actually gave the master bedroom to Opal, never seeing a reason for space he didn’t want. In his cramped bedroom was simply a bed, a bedside table covered in an assortment of shit ranging from multicoloured zippos and polaroids of the rain. In the centre, laid his heart on the perpetually messy bed, bloody and stabbed with ten oriental daggers like a tarot card, free for viewing and ready for sacrifice.

Ronan loved this room because it was the last place in Henrietta he hadn’t shared willingly with Adam Parrish, the only place his longing hadn’t bled all on. The only place Ronan owned that Adam hadn’t touched.

 _Not anymore_ , Ronan thought to himself in mourning, watching Adam read through the book titles Ronan scattered onto the floor.

Now he has polluted this place. And these bed sheets. And these floorboards too.

There were not enough cans of air freshener that could expel the scent of Adam out of this place. Not enough essential oils in production to make Ronan forget the forest and the boy birthed from its soil.

Adam, same pragmatic Adam that tended to Ronan’s broken bones as boys, didn’t touch any of Ronan’s belongings. Ronan was relieved as he bounced onto his mattress, refusing to even shimmy out of his jeans. He didn’t really want to disinfect his collection of rocks Opal picked up from the playground nor the novelty ashtrays Noah buys him from different gas stations ( _“just in case you want to go full bad boy and start a nicotine addiction.”_ ) 

“Just like old times?” Adam asked softly. Ronan wanted to knock out his teeth.

“Always”

Ronan lazily opens the closet door with his foot, watching from a safe distance as Adam carefully unbuttoned his shirt with precision. Ronan doesn’t want to see how much Adam has changed over the years, doesn't want evidence of the eleven years apart. He still doesn’t tear his eyes away from Adam’s back, fuller than his memory informs him.

Passing Adam an oversized sweater, made from home shaven sheep wool with care by Aurora, Ronan ached. Hating himself for being so wired to Adam he could still remember the other man couldn’t stand the cold but was too polite to ever ask for warmth. 

Ronan always had too much to give with nowhere to put it all and Adam still wouldn’t accept any form of charity.

Adam mumbled a thanks under his breath, slipping the sweater over his head and giving Ronan enough time for some much deserved self hatred. He wants to build a city the same size as the years Adam left him to rot between them. He wanted to bury his face in the space of where Adam’s hair touches his neck in gentle curls.

Adam’s breathing is heavy as he lays down onto the mattress with his back to Ronan, but Ronan knows he’s not faring any better. For how forbearing he came across from evening through dinner all to now, Adam seemed skittish now. Vulnerability always worse in the dark with how much easier it came to either of them. It was still very hard to forget they were still technically strangers.

Eleven years was enough time to wash a person out of your memory.

Not when it came to Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish.

Laying his head onto the pillow feels like surrender. His body betrays him, his eyelids won’t close. Drinking everything about Adam’s form without the warning thorns like the river styx. Dehydrated and dying from water poisoning.

Ronan could recognise him from the crooked way his spine bent when he slept on his side, his deaf ear muffled by the pillow.

Given the choice, Ronan would love the rest of his life in an empty room. The walls would cave in, the floorboards would creak in a poisonous melody, there would be strange mold that changed colours depending on the speed of his breath. Opal would be there, and occasionally the rest of his friends and family would appear. Most importantly, the room would be a place where he had no memory of Adam Parrish.

“What is it?”

“What?”

“I can feel you staring at me.”

Adam doesn’t turn around when he says it but Ronan can see the way his shoulders hunch up to his ears just to fall back down again.

“I want a proper apology, or at least an explanation,” Ronan said, a very _un-Ronan_ thing to say. But Adam had left him for eleven years. It wasn't fair. Nothing about this was fair. “You can’t just fucking do this to me out of nowhere, Parrish.”

“Okay,” Adam agreed without resistance, a very _un-Adam_ reply.

Ronan holds his breath, pries his heart open enough to let Adam slip in with the right words. Just the correct sentence and Ronan wouldn’t fight anymore. He wants an apology, something he never prioritised before Adam had stomped all over his aching soul like a morbid slow dance. He never wanted anything more except for maybe Adam himself.

“Give me your hand,” Adam says instead.

Ronan does so without a fight.

But he has to reach around Adam’s body to do so. Get close enough for his hands to reach Adam’s. By the time Adam was tracing lines into Ronan’s palm with his blunt fingernails, Ronan could feel every knot of Adam’s spine digging into his chest, bare skin of their thighs brushing. Sweet torture.

It continues like this for far longer than Ronan can stand. Just heavy silence and Adam touching him like a spirit. “Can I touch your wrists?” He asks the moon, request muffled into the pillow like he was too afraid to ask.

And Ronan hates that Adam asks firsts. It meant he couldn’t get mad at Adam for peeling back his layers like a clementine, prodding at his vulnerabilities. Not if Ronan gives him permission first.

Ronan surrenders, pressing his forehead to Adam’s shoulder. He feels Adam tense up but neither of them said a word. Ronan nods, trying desperately not to lose himself to the forested scent of Adam Parrish’s neck like a creep.

They were two strangers in a bed.

The stranger runs his finger over the white canyon over Ronan’s healed artery with the ghost of a touch. Ronan felt like a dam about to burst. He’s never hated Adam Parrish more.

“I know I should’ve at least said goodbye, I’m sorry about that most,” Adam starts, his vowels all rounded around his tongue in that Henrietta accent Ronan missed like the rain and open fields the colour of Adam’s hair.

Ronan taps his other finger against Adam’s rib cage like piano keys, ignoring the way Adam shudders. A silent melody for a film track. The part where everything goes to shit with a loud piano solo raging on in the background. Waiting in suspense. “About eleven years too fucking late, Parrish, tell me something that isn’t complete horseshit.”

Adam sighs, Ronan feels the way his lungs expand to accommodate for the melancholic change under his palms. Ronan resists melting into his rightful place against Adam’s back, curving like a flower chasing fleeting sunlight.

“I rarely stopped thinking about you”

Ronan needed to explode, molotov cocktails replacing every organ under his skin.

“I thought you had forgotten about me,” Ronan whispered, watching in fascination as the hair on Adam’s neck swayed lightly with his breath, “Up there in Boston, probably with a beautiful wife and a suburban house like you always wanted.”

“I wish I knew how to forget about you.”

Adam huffed on the tender skin of Ronan’s wrists, Ronan tempted him to brush his lips instead by scooting closer. A silent request. Adam’s chapped mouth strokes Ronan’s arm like dried wheat stalks. Ronan needed to steady himself without leaving his hands off Adam’s body.

“What are you doing here, Adam?”

“I don’t think-” he clears his throat, Ronan twists his hand to slot their fingers together in support, “I don’t think I know what I want anymore.”

Ronan doesn’t understand. He doesn’t tell Adam this, only taking a shuddering breath as he finally collided into Adam like a child coming home from summer camp. Keeping his own racing heartbeat under wraps as he dissected Adam's careful words. He didn't know what Adam wanted either. He begged god for the answer to be _just this._ The cold night, darkness, touch, Opal sleeping a hallway down _._ Preferably forever _._

He knows Adam is syncing up their breaths, the same way he would when he came back to the Barns after days missing, covered in bruises without explanations. Ronan gives him this, comfort and home and acceptance. All without words.

Adam, fluent in Ronan the same way Ronan was fluent in Adam, presses Ronan’s knuckles against his cheek. His eyelashes flutter over Ronan’s skin and Ronan can feel the dampness of dew. A strangled sound escapes his throat, defeated like a wounded animal. A gift of secrecy.

“Why did you leave,” Ronan asks the darkness.

“We both know why”

Ronan digs his free hand into the mattress before he erupts. He was never wrong about the theories he formed at night, missing Adam like a lung in his too empty bed. Nothing was crueller than the truth.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Adam mumbled in repeated prayer. His grip on their hands has gotten tighter, either from desperation or sorrow. Ronan, who had forgiven him three hours ago, says nothing. Guilt and anger and a much deeper emotion he didn't want to mention by name surfaces up. He had scared Adam away, Adam had abandoned him in lonely Henrietta. There was no heaven or hell, no right or wrong. Just a strange place with no morals laying crumbled against Adam Parrish's boyish spine. 

Niall told his sons about Icarus when they could barely read. Ronan was never fond of that story, didn't like the way Icarus had to die because he fell in love with flight.

Now he hooked ankles with Adam underneath the blanket like they did when they were sixteen and confused, willingly allowing himself to be consumed by the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is such a long chapter for just one scene but,,, need more angst


	3. to think we could stay the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> really short chapter because i'm struggling to write the second part of this, i'm no good at writing cute shit fellas, it's angst and yearning or nothing with me (at least the next chapter is significantly longer)

Ronan woke up alone.

Even though Ronan often woke up with half his bed too big (unless Opal demanded to be coddled), the absence of a body next to him that particular morning was more jarring than ever. It was cold and unforgiving, emotions he had long associated with Adam Parrish and his hollow Henrietta accent. Freezing like an apparition, the ghost of his past coming back to haunt him, Ronan wrapped himself tightly around the recently shared comforter.

Running a flat palm over his buzzcut, Ronan groaned into the mussed pillow next to him, still warm with a living body. Forests and summer nights spent hiding under quilted blankets drowned his senses. His body repulsed with familiarity. A war between praying yesterday was a fever dream and wanting to carve every second into the bone of his skull.

And in a moment of defeat, he clutches the pillow close to his chest, his cheek unshaven against the cotton, heart like a lighter ready to set his entire room on fire.

Ronan hears laughter coming from the kitchen from his bedroom door before he even steps into the hallway, still groggy and barely functioning.

The first, high pitched and careless, was easily identifiable as Opal’s giggling. Ronan melts, shaking his head in fondness like an old farmer might greet the familiarity of bird songs in the morning.

The second was a sound that went straight through Ronan like an arrow, a melody he last heard coming from a shopping cart going down a steep hill, in the passenger seat of the beemer with the doors wide open, in streams deep into forests far from the main road.

If he held his breath long enough, Adam Parrish’s laugh was not much different from a saint’s.

Walking in was harder than it really had to be, watching Adam and Opal bond like Adam had known her all her life and not just for one night.

“What are you two hooligans up to?” Ronan whispered in mocked suspicion, more for Opal’s amusement than actual concern. He picks her up with one arm and dumps her on the counter, sitting rightfully by her side, assessing the mess they had made of his kitchen (not that it had ever been that neat when Aurora wasn’t visiting).

Adam rolls his eyes, shoving a mug into Ronan’s hands as he carefully placed dishes into the sink, “Isn’t that your title?”

Ronan revels into the warmth seeping into his palms, carefully raising the rim to his lips like he was offered expensive champagne instead of the 2-in-1 coffee mix he kept in the upper cupboards. Something about Adam getting up and preparing it especially for him made him ignite hotter than the drink, he quickly schools his face into a stoic mask.

His tongue burns with the coffee as it slides down his throat, artificial love raining down in him. On lonely nights, cold and storming outside the barns, Ronan was convinced this was the only comfort he was deserving of. The cold beers he consumed one by one until he built a fortress on church alters were self -destruction. Warmth in a cup had always been the opposite for him, Christmas nights around a tree with hot chocolate in each Lynch’s hands, the black coffee his father drank every morning the rare times he was home, the scalding hot tea his mother served with cakes at her cafe. It was a desperate last resort substitution for love.

Ronan stared at Adam over the rim of the mug, steam clouding his sight like fog. Adam stared back with his pretty mouth twisted into a small frown.

“Sorry if it sucks, I didn’t know if you took your coffee the same way.”

Ronan slurped louder, trying desperately to cover up the loud thrumming of his pulse. Of course, Adam would fucking remember. Ronan wonders if it was better if he had forgotten instead.

Looking Adam now, openly in the daylight, was disconcerting and strange.

Everything about him was wrong. The way his hair fell over his eyes, artfully and deliberately even stilled mussed from sleep. His freckles were faded, nothing like the explosion of constellations that littered his face as a boy. His teeth, still straight and handsome, showed more often he smiled and the way he grinned reached all the way up to his eyes.

It was like trying to stare at something that looked the same with a different shape. Spine straighter, shoulders wider, jaw looser. It was uncanny and made Ronan feel uneasy, trying to recircuit his memory of the rigid boy he knew with this handsome stranger in his kitchen.

Adam looked nothing like Ronan was expecting.

In his mind, lonely and missing him, missing him, missing him ( _always missing him_ ), Ronan imagined a marble statue. Rich, regal, married with a Boston apartment and a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience. A wedding ring around his elegant fingers, pictures of two and a half kids in his leather wallet. A ghost of the scrawny boy that left Henrietta behind. Same blue eyes, different face, a corpse of Ronan’s first crush. Someone more like Declan or Gansey but much more soulless, without a genuine smile or quirks. 

Someone easy to hate.

Still, Adam’s thumb bent the same way, his knuckles still knobbly. Hair curling at his neck, huffed laugh, charming as ever. There was that same mole on the back of his neck, the same eye roll and same gentle lilt, that same _look_. The look that made a much younger Ronan almost hopeful for a different ending from the current one he was living in for the both of them.

One that involved a much bigger bed with less space for him to take up. Dinners with Matthew when he drops in unannounced. Opal’s legal papers statting two parents instead of one.

Ronan almost wished Adam had changed way more, enough to be unrecognisable. For them to be actual strangers. Enough so that his body wouldn’t be so easy to trust again.

Adam snapped his fingers in front of Ronan’s face, that same amused grin on his mouth, “No breakfast, chef?”

Ronan smirked back, cocking his head to the side, missing Adam more that he was actually here, close enough to touch but unsure if it was allowed, “this isn’t a five star hotel, Parrish.”

“Could’ve fooled me with the view.”

Adam was looking back at Ronan when he sniped back. Ronan shoved him out of the way of the fridge to distract him from the blush warming up his face.

Ronan watches the way Adam visibly reacts to him pulling out a plate of his mom’s apple pie from the fridge, the one she sent them just two nights before, her mother senses must have told her Adam was coming over. Opal jumps off the counter to scoop the whipping cream off with her finger before Ronan could even place the slices nicely on plates for their guest. She gave him a shrug in apology when he swatted her hands away.

“I’ve already had pie yesterday,” Adam muttered, patting his stomach with a frown, but still picking up a fork eagerly as Opal guided him to the dining table, “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“Shut the fuck up old man and abandon your stupid carb-free diet.”

Adam shrugged in defeat, feeding Opal a bite off his fork first in lazy aeroplane loops even though she had her own plate in front of her. She smiles at him, all canines as he huffs in amusement. Ronan finally understood the appeal of Aurora taking baby photos of him and his brothers for every little thing they did.

Ronan rested his chin in his palms as he watched Adam’s face changes the more he ate, the way he blinked after his first bite to the way he squeezed his eyes shut, the corners of his mouth tugging upwards around the fork.

“God how does your mom manage to make the best pie on earth.”

“Grandma said her secret ingredient is love,” Opal mutters, mouth full and covered in crumbs, “But Kerah says that’s _bullshit_ , she just adds a lot of vanilla.”

Adam laughs, a sudden burst that releases a small colony of butterflies in Ronan’s stomach. The sweetness of apple filling and dusted sugar was nothing compared to this, the two people Ronan loved dearly in a sickeningly domestic portrait. Ronan was never going to be able to eat his mother’s pie again without thinking of this morning. He shoves Opal’s knitted cap over her eyes for exposing him. Adam continues grinning.

“How long are you staying?” Ronan muttered, not really wanting the answer, “I could teach you before you leave.”

Adam’s face softens, his eyebrows quirking upward and his smile going mellow instead of the electric shock that previously possessed him. He pulls at the sleeve of the sweater Ronan gave him. Ronan averts his gaze to Opal instead, cowardly and afraid.

“Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Adam replies, composed even as he wipes at his chin with the collar of his sweater, “I didn’t wanna impose on your family like this really, but I’ll be here for long enough, I could always get a room somewhere else.”

“We don’t mind,” Opal interrupts, tugging on his sweater to grab his attention. Adam smiles sweetly, letting her hold his hand instead.

“Uh huh, I was just gon’ ask Kerah if I could work at the bakery temporarily.”

Ronan blinks, mildly distracted by the loll of Adam’s vowels as his accent slips around his tongue.

“That’s all? You want to work at the bakery again?”

And Ronan remembers how futile working at the bakery for his mother was when Adam was around. How Adam always managed to snatch his attention, even when he barely said a word, sweeping the floors and looking wispy. Ronan couldn’t imagine focusing at work with a much older Adam around, especially since Ronan actually had responsibilities now.

Adam nodded. Ronan nodded too.

“I just don’t wanna owe you.”

It was such an Adam Parrish response that it knocked Ronan’s breath out. Such an Adam Parrish answer Ronan hated him for it. He really was the same person.

Ronan inhaled sharply through his nose, crossing his arms over his chest. Thirteen years ago, Adam had said the same thing to Aurora Lynch when she started offering him free lunches. He had denied over and over again for weeks before caving in on his own terms. Ronan back then, constantly angry, didn’t understand why his mother spent so much time being compassionate to someone so uptight. Searching Adam’s eyes now, ashamed with the ghost of a boy birthed from dirt, Ronan understood why she could never deny him this. His need for control over himself, letting him be his own king over his life even as an adult.

If Adam hadn't said that, Ronan would gladly give him a position at the bakery without a second thought.

The frustration of wanting Adam to be taken care of without feeling indebt but knowing it wasn't his place to force Adam to get over this fundamental part of him was what differed him from Gansey as teenagers. Familiarity ripped through Ronan, all consuming, memories of sleepovers in his childhood bedroom talking gently about how Adam needed his space, learning how he wasn't given any of it in his double-wide. Months of recognition, the way Ronan knew Adam like he knew himself, a smudged mirror of needs. It came flooding back all at once, threatening to drown Ronan as he stared at Adam now in the present, real and alive and back home where it was always warm.

Ronan sent Opal to her to get ready for school against her protests, rubbing his temples with his fingers as Adam stared at him cooly, with expectation.

“You don’t owe me shit,” Ronan stated with finality, watching how Adam's frown only deepened, unsure whether to be irritated or unreasonably fond of his stubbornness. Eleven years and they were still arguing about the same shit.

“I _know_ that,” Adam sniped back, getting up from his seat with such abruption it could only mean he really _didn’t_. He cleared the plates, placed them in the sink, the clank of ceramic against metal startling in the tense silence, and stood right next to Ronan as Ronan watched him carefully. “Then let me work for a salary, like any other employee, so I’m not just doing nothing the whole time I’m here.”

Ronan stared up, watching the way Adam tucked his hair behind his ears. The uptight way he stood like they were teenagers again, arguing about whose turn it was to pay for pizza that night. Both frustrated, both understanding. Ronan knew what this meant to a younger Adam, he gave into the older Adam as well.

“To be clear, this isn’t a fucking exchange.”

Adam lifted one shoulder to his deaf ear, “loud and clear.”

Neither of them really changed, not as much as Ronan thinks. The mental barrier he had put up, a safety net, was to ensure he didn’t have to grieve again. All night, body pressed into Adam’s torso with Adam’s spine leaving an imprint into his skin, Ronan had been praying for them to be strangers. Then maybe this would be easier to abandon when everything eventually goes to shit. But the way he spoke and the way he argued, it was getting harder for Ronan to convince himself he had only wanted the old Adam, not this shinier version of him misplaced from Boston.

In a moment of weakness, maybe even selfishness, Ronan agrees. Because he missed Adam and some self-hating part of him needed more time spent by his side before he would undeniably run off again. Now it was a matter of counting down the minutes before the second ending and Ronan wanted to waste as little of that limited time apart again.

It was concerning how easily he gave into suffocation.

“Fine, tomorrow.”

Ronan shook his head with a groan. Adam mouthed thanks as he went back to the sink to wash up, not quite a smile on his lips but close enough to hurt.

“Mom misses you anyways,” Ronan muttered to the now empty coffee mug. She wasn’t the only one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay is it super obvious i'm insecure about my writing in this chapter :)


	4. nobody butters me up like you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can't write fluff oof
> 
> also this chapter is just:  
> ronan: *puts on clown nose* *puts on clown shoes* *puts on clown wig* *puts on clown-

Adam was silent on the drive to the bakery.

Waking up before the world did was a habit Ronan had installed into him as a child raised on a farm. From the day he was born, when the sky split open and every flower in Virginia bloomed at once, chaos ruled him like an unnamed god. Hectic mornings at the Barns, always unapologetically loud and alive, bursting with so much love contained behind walls. His mother making breakfast, his father in his suit ready to leave again, his brothers fighting without any malice or harm while putting on their shoes.

Even now as an adult, without any cows to feed or lambs to groom or dogs to walk, Opal was a handful. Enough to keep Ronan as busy as he was as a simple farmer, a boy. Just waiting for his father to come back home.

Driving with Adam in his passenger seat, demanding nothing of him with his deafening silence, Ronan has never been so calm, like time and noise had been suck out of the universe with a vacuum.There was never a rush with him, a holy feeling Ronan could only recreate when he was at mass on Sundays.

Still, his pulse didn't seem to get the memo, beating twice as fast when Adam says anything in passing comment, the lilt of his accent snagging the ends of his words sleepily.

They passed the little dreaming town filled with barely any awake little people, not caring about the dark BMW driving on the streets carrying a boy in love with the other. The local supermarket signs advertise half price apricots due to the fast approaching winter. Ronan doesn’t pull over and buy handfuls of them even if he loved sinking his teeth into the fuzzy flesh of the fruit as a child, the sticky sweetness running down his chin, not with his track record of leaving things he wants outside for too long to rot until they were unedible.

He pretends not to see Adam, who used to offer apricots to Ronan by pressing them to his lips, perk up at the sign stating the two for the price of one deal. 

The church comes into view, St Agnes where Adam slept sometimes when his father locked him outside the double-wide and where Ronan would undoubtedly sleep too next to him as an act of devotion. Ronan stares at the crumbling building framed by Adam’s silhouette. Adam turns his head away in shame. Their eyes meet, Ronan gets lost in the sunrise’s shadow casting on Adam’s face.

“Do you remember the way we used to chase each other on the streets without shoes,” Ronan says abruptly, trying to distract Adam from the sudden jerk of his head as he looks away.

Adam, half-asleep and mid-yawn, turns his torso to face Ronan. Ronan tries not to swerve the car off the road, keeping cool as he accepted his turn to look away. A dance between them, an unspoken agreement not to look at the same time, Ronan pretended the asphalt was more interesting than Adam Parrish’s cheekbones.

“You threw my shoes in the lake so I was forced to run around on hot concrete barefooted with you,” Adam complained without a grudge, one corner of his mouth upturned into a lopsided, amused grin.

“Admit that I was a fucking delight to hang out with, loser,” Ronan teased, daring a glance to his right to catch Adam smiling.

“I never said you weren’t,” Adam deadpanned, a soft look on his face.

They fade into silence again the farther Ronan drove and the faster exhaustion caught up onto Adam. How the other man survived high school with so many sleepless nights studying with Ronan dozing off in his lap was a mystery. Ronan assumed he would be forced to become a morning person off at Harvard. It seemed Adam never changed.

And Ronan wonders what the trees were trying to whisper to Adam as they flurried by, muffled by the thick glass. Maybe they were welcoming him home, begging him to visit the graveyard of a creek he had left behind along with Ronan and his old swimming shorts. Maybe they were siding with Ronan for once, demanding for answers neither man could even formulate. 

Ronan tapped a rhythm on his steering wheel (indents of his father’s hands curled around the leather, dried blood from Ronan’s knuckles still there like a crime scene), he doubted it. Henrietta loved Adam Parrish. But Adam Parrish didn’t know how to love things like Henrietta back.

Ronan knew this. Still, he bit hard on his lip, grounding himself into the engine like its restlessness was enough to distract him from Adam and his exposed neck as he rests his head against the window.

Adam’s gentle breathing the only noticeable sound, carbon dioxide filling up the air, sharing oxygen like they used to share everything else. Ronan flickered his gaze, watching Adam’s face from the reflection of the window. His mouth twisted and pressed against his arm, their bodies only a gearshift away than seemed to stretch farther than the distance separating Virginia from Boston. 

_Please keep him safe_ , Ronan prayed to the open road and cicadas trapped under his windshield wipers, things he could see and understand. Keep Adam safe from _what exactly_ , Ronan hadn’t decided yet.

Maybe from Ronan himself. What an awful weapon he had grown up into.

Ronan was silent on the drive to the bakery. 

There was an apron hung up in the employee’s closet untouched simply because no one dared to fold it and put it away.

Never dirtied because its owner washed it often in McDonald restrooms right before his shift, the name embroidered messily in red thread right above the Cabeswater logo read _Adam Parrish_.

His mother called it a good omen, always brushing away the dust off tenderly when she came across it, Ronan thought it was more like a funeral token. He avoided it most times he cleared off the tiny cupboard now filled with more aprons over the years.

Without a word, Ronan finally removed it from its hook, gently putting it around its owner’s neck again.

Adam looked down, his face unfairly blank as he pinched the fabric with his fingers. Ronan watched while leaning against the door frame, not allowing the image of Adam in his old uniform to get to him. A boy with hunched shoulders and a man with a college degree, a Henrietta accent and a Boston postal code, two entities Ronan kept separate in his mind blurring into the same person.

“You kept it after all this time?” Adam asked, bewildered.

Ronan nodded, unable to give an explanation as to why even if he wanted to.

Next to Adam Parrish, Cabeswater was Ronan’s whole world.

His father had two main restaurants, one in DC and the other in Kerry, Ireland, both too far away from home to mean anything significant to Ronan except for the places his father disappeared for months.

But the bakery, cosily tucked in the busiest part of Henrietta closest to Aglionby Academy near the other sleepy diners and a short walk from the nearest laundromat, was birthed from Aurora Lynch’s love for warmth and the joy of spreading it. In the months following his father’s death right before meeting Adam, Ronan only had the display of sugary pastries and frosting in different colours to soften his edges. It was the closest thing he had to home away from Singer’s Fall.

The buildings lining the streets cast shadows on the sidewalk as Ronan flipped the sign from closed to open, shifting his tables align with his hip instead of lifting them up like he was supposed to. Adam helps him switch on all the lights, from the soft LEDs on the ceiling to the novelty cow-shaped lamps Aurora had insisted were important. 

The embroidered decorations on the walls of farm animals, the little scarecrow doll that held a little ‘welcome’ sign on the counter, the quilted tablecloth, everything about Cabeswater made Ronan feel surrounded by his mother. Warm and loved, constantly held.

Even in his completely dark attire and heavy combat boots worn as a warning sign for danger, Ronan knew he held no venom when inside these walls.

Having Adam in a faded apron again in the middle of the seating area shot a pure dose of nostalgia disguised as heroin into his veins, his hands tucked in the kangaroo pocket like he used to do constantly as a teenager waiting for instructions.

“Still feels like home,” Adam slurred, rocking back and forth on his heels.

Even though Cabeswater has definitely been through some renovations over the last eleven years (the new display case and the addition of Opal’s drawings framed on the walls), Ronan knew exactly what he meant. Cabeswater would always welcome Adam Parrish home and so would its owners. 

Ronan said nothing, grabbing Adam by the elbows to lead him slowly to the kitchen.

Ronan was glad he brought Adam in on his first day on a relatively slow day, a day he could afford to give his employees time off.

Selfishness, an awful trait Ronan has been working hard to abolish since noticing how his behaviour had been affecting Gansey, led Ronan to this. One indulgence Ronan surrenders himself to, a need to be alone with Adam. Even in his bed, it wasn’t the same, not with Opal so close by, the fear of being caught. The shame of wanting him so painfully after so long. 

Now, completely alone in the bakery without anyone else, Ronan shamelessly drowns in Adam’s presence, trying to convince himself Adam wasn’t a mere dream.

Adam, if he notices the stark lack of another human soul, doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he starts checking cupboards and drawers, seeing if everything was still in the same order since he left (it was), humming in satisfaction as he surveyed the entire room. Ronan watching him the entire time.

“Today’s agenda, boss?” he asks, resting his elbows on the main metal table in the centre with his cheek in his palm, watching Ronan expectantly. Ronan burned with delight at the secluded attention, tries not to show it on his face.

Ronan nods, tapping his black painted nails on the cover of the recipe book his mother kept on the counter, “Since you currently suck at baking.” Adam makes an unimpressed face, Ronan grins at him. “We start with tarts.”

It wasn’t fair for someone to look so good sifting flour.

Adam had his sleeves pushed up to his elbows, both hands powdered white as he handled the sift with the same rapt focus Ronan always found endearing. Strands of his hair fell out of place over his eyes, the lean muscles on his forearms a little more defined as he clutched tightly on the handle. Ronan watches the way Adam’s eyebrows furrowed tongue-tied, heavy behind his teeth.

“Okay now add 150 grams of icing sugar.”

“How much is that in ounces?”

“My dad would be shaking in his grave if you use anything else except the metric system in a Lynch kitchen.”

Adam huffs a laugh, sounding more like a tired wheeze as he tried to carefully weigh the sugar with an electric balance. Ronan, who was used to simply estimating and throwing what felt like the right amount, found himself fond of Adam’s prudence, a lighted candle behind his ribs threatening to break out into a national crisis sized wildfire.

“Alright,” Adam announced when he was done, seeming satisfied with his work, washing off the crystals off his hands at the sink, unlike Ronan who would’ve just rubbed his palms together.

“Alright,” Ronan agreed, jumping off the counter he was sitting on to help Adam retrieve butter from the chiller and placing it next to him with a knife, “450 grams for one set, cut them into smaller cubes so they melt faster.”

“That’s a lot of butter,” Adam comments while following obediently, holding the knife firm enough Ronan could see his protruding veins.

Ronan walks around him, the domesticity of the situation striking him quickly like venom, a dull ache in his chest like an addicted smoker. “Didn’t ya mama ever tell you love is stored in the butter?” He mocked in an intimation of Adam’s southern drawl, purposefully butchered to melt the tension out of the other man.  
  
It works, Adam grins, all dimples and sugary, “No, but _your_ mama did.” Ronan laughs, openly, his cheeks strained. Adam’s charming smile falls into something dangerously subdued, half-heartedly poking the mixture with fingertips. “Maybe I should’ve had more butter as a child.”

Ronan took the bowl from him, rubbing the butter into the flour like he’s been doing since he was six with missing teeth. It wasn’t fair someone so melancholic could look so beautiful. It wasn’t fair someone so beautiful had to face so much melancholia.

Ronan smears butter onto Adam’s cheek like they’re teenage boys again, Adam rolling his eyes with a grin plastered on his lips again. “Nah, I think you should’ve just had more love.”

They work in silence for a while, the lighting inside the kitchen shifting from soft orange to bright daylight, Adam’s elbows jostling as he incorporated the butter further with the flour. Next to him, Ronan beats the bettercream frosting from yesterday with a hand mixer, the electric buzz not much different from his own pulse. It felt like he was being smothered by a hazy daydream. Running on autopilot and enjoying the manual part of baking until he notices Adam struggling to cut anything with the blunt knife.

“Okay okay,” Ronan huffed, tugging on Adam’s elbow to grab his attention. Adam groaned, dropping the knife in frustration. They both listened to it clatter to the ground, Adam running a hand through his fringe while Ronan rested his hands on the other man’s shoulders, knowing god knows what was running through his cluttered mind right now. 

“Maybe try running the knife under hot water first, cowboy,” Ronan teases, bending down to pick it up from the floor and washing it at the sink with hot water. 

Adam hovers close to him, watching Ronan as he easily sliced through the butter, close enough Ronan could feel puffs of Adam’s breath seeping through his tank top and sending a landmine to go off underneath his skin.

“Like the Fiona Apple song?”

“Yeah,” Ronan grinned in response to how Adam seemed to completely melt that Ronan still had his sixteen-year-old angsty playlist memorised, “Like the Fiona Apple song.”

“I love that song.”

“I know.”

And watching Adam at a distance meant for lovers humming the tune under his breath like a habit, his head bobbing lightly to a tune only they could hear in their shared silence, Ronan couldn’t help but wonder if everyone ached this severely or if he was the only default.

“How does someone who spent years being top in chemistry at a private school manage to be so shit at baking.”

"How does a hooligan who's never stepped into the chemistry lab once manage to handle a whole kitchen all on his own?"

Ronan flicks the tip of Adam's nose with his index finger, "It's 'cause I'm magic, baby."

Adam rolls his eyes at him, huffing as he struggles with the soggy dough. Ronan dumps in another half cup of flour in the muddy mixture to balance out the egg yolk Adam had poured too much at once, pressing his chest to Adam’s back to reach the bowl.

The kitchen drowns in silence once more, awkward with their combined loud breathing and Ronan’s heart pounding in his ears, trying to keep it cool while he drinks up Adam’s warmth casually.

He watches in silent devotion as Adam rectifies his mistake, tapping his fingers against Adam’s hip once he’s satisfied with the consistency. Adam grins shyly, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, the majority of his riding up shirt unfortunately obscured by the apron.

Ronan clears his throat, “Alright, now knead it with the heel of your palm.”

Watching Adam roll out the dough before carefully shaping the tart shells in their cups with his thumb and forefinger made looking away very hard for Ronan as he imagined Adam’s lovely hands, garish knuckles with long and elegant fingers, touching things far from just wet flour mixed with eggs.

Ronan was beyond grateful the bakery was closed today.

A streak of white flour on his cheeks, over his freckles and dusting his eyelashes like fallen snow. Ronan remembers the way they would smear flour all over each other as boys, connected by the hip and laughing joyfully with abundance. Moments like that reminded Ronan of sunlight entering the kitchen window and the scent of vanilla essence drowning them both. It was the ache of a summer passed and the wrongness of a stranger standing in the place of his dear friend, wearing the same face and overwhelming Ronan in the exact same way.

Adam wipes his hands off onto his apron once he was done and Ronan pushes up his hair from his eyes. Their eyes meet like they’ve never seen each other before, like they weren’t constantly looking. Adam huffed while Ronan joked about Adam being gross and sweaty.

They take a break as the tarts bake in the oven, Adam sitting in a proper chair like the loser he is with his eyes closed in exhaustion and Ronan sitting on the counter with a tub of leftover cookie dough from the batch they baked on Thursday.

“Aren’t those for the customers?” Adam jibed not unkindly with his eyes still shut, unable to see the way Ronan mimics him for being a real life of the party.

“Yeah? And who's gonna stop me?” Ronan mocks back teasingly, amused by how much the idea of eating raw cookie dough seemed to turn Adam off, “Aurora isn't here, goody two shoes.”

“Right, remind me again why she passed the family business to you and not Declan.”

“Because Declan sucks next question.”

Adam gets up to stand by Ronan’s side, before he rolls his eyes with his shoulders tensing up and chest puffed out even with that teasing smirk on his mouth. Ronan shifts closer, crossing his arms in challenge. Adam shoves him on the shoulder lightly, just enough to make Ronan’s smile bloom wider with his teeth peeking out.

“You're disgusting,” Adam huffs, unimpressed, the corner of his lips tugging up enough that the corner of his eyes ripples too.

“And yet you're the one sleeping in my bed.”

Adam shoves Ronan harder, this time enough to make him sway with the force of it under his feet. It doesn’t distract either of them from the blushing forming on Adam’s cheek.

Ronan taunts Adam by taking an exaggerated lick from his fingers, being overdramatic enough to make Adam’s face twist in discomfort. He shakes his head in disappointment, like he couldn't believe Ronan was capable of parenting a child with the same mental age as him.

Ronan pressed his fingers flat to Adam’s mouth who only further presses his lips together. He raises an eyebrow at Ronan’s childish behaviour, Ronan jabs at his sides in a failed attempt to tickle Adam.

Adam sticks his tongue out in defeat, tasting the raw cookie dough and knitted his eyebrows together like it was the worst thing Ronan’s ever put him through (it really isn’t), but this was without a doubt the worst thing Ronan has ever done to himself.

Ronan freezes. Adam takes Ronan’s finger in between his lips all the way up to his knuckles, eyes flickering to watch Ronan’s face. Ronan, overwhelmed with his mind blank and on overdrive at the same time, says nothing with his mouth dry, trying not to drown in Adam’s warm mouth and the confused interest his body takes with Adam’s tongue.

“Hungry?” Ronan says instead of anything coherent, still short-circuiting like a teenage boy.

Adam clears his throat, face red, without actually saying anything and nodding in agreement. Ronan nods back, shuffling to his office without looking back in order to control his breathing before being able to look at Adam ever again.

They have the instant noodles Ronan keeps in his desk drawer for lunch, catching up like old friends in between bites, Ronan sitting on the desk while Adam lazed in his office chair.

“How is Aurora?” Adam asks, feeding Ronan his noodles with chopsticks after teasing Ronan for sucking at using them. Ronan flips him off, stubbornly chewing his noodles anyways as Adam grins at him.

“God, she’s actually seeing Opal’s babysitter,” Ronan groaned, rubbing both of his eyes with the heel of his palms like he wants to gauge them out at the idea of his mom dating. “My employee’s mom, we’re gonna be step siblings next spring.”

Adam laughs a quiet thing, his face shifting into something gentler, “I didn’t know Aurora was bi.”

“You have a problem with my mama, Parrish?” Ronan accused, flicking the broth onto Adam’s face. Adam kicks his shins in retaliation.

Of course, Ronan knew Adam didn’t, not with the casual way he reacted when Ronan came out to him when they were sixteen at the Barns. They didn’t change after that, still slept in the same bed, still close friends even as Ronan struggled with this part of himself he couldn’t explain. Of all the people on earth, Ronan knew Adam would be the most pragmatic when it came to these tender parts of his life. 

Still, the strangled way he reacted stood out, like a snag in the road when they cycled down hills together, screaming their lungs out for Henrietta to trap in her summers forever.

Adam shook his head at Ronan’s taunting, wiping at his face with the edge of his apron.

“Didn’t realise it ran in the family ‘s all.”

“Oh yeah we all have the gay gene, can’t wait for Opal’s first girlfriend.”

Adam laughs again, this time a much more open thing. It almost made Ronan feel hopeful, a knot in his throat revealing itself to be spring blooming from his heart’s valves.

"And you? Still no husband?"

Ronan flickers his gaze up to Adam. Adam was already staring back.

"No, no husband," Ronan mumbled, tilting his head to the side, his ear touching his shoulder.

Adam released the tension in his shoulders, his smile shifting into something much gentler.

Adam Parrish had ruined Ronan for anyone else.

They stop working at seven, partially because Ronan didn’t have the mood to shape any more fucking tarts that day and partially because Adam was starting to droop more and more in exhaustion as the hours pass by.

It made Ronan feel like lightning knowing Adam had travelled 600 miles to be home with Ronan, suffering from a lack of sleep just to spend more time with him.

“Pack up, we still got errands.”

The relieved look on Adam’s face as he keeps the last tray of tarts into the freezer was almost comical.

“Thank fucking god,” Adam groaned, stretching his undoubtedly cramp arms.

“Don’t be fucking rude, Parrish,” Ronan mocked, already waiting for him at the door with all the lights turned off.

They drop off the BMW at Ronan’s apartment first before collecting the laundry bag Ronan had (responsibility) left out in the hallway from that morning, Opal still at the Sargent’s as Ronan tried to clear off his god awful chores without her meddling.

They had dirty laundry piling up from over the week, a chaotic mixture of Opal’s warmer coats and mittens along with Ronan’s jackets and boxers.

And when they first moved in, Aurora had warned him he would get sick off travelling all the way to the laundromat eventually, that he should just get a washing machine to put in the kitchen.

He didn’t listen of course. Stubborn as ever.

Now Adam walked next to him, helping him to carry a full bag of laundry, clutching onto Ronan’s shoulder so he wouldn’t slip on the wet pavement.

It would’ve been easier if they had taken the beemer to town, it would’ve saved them some time too. But Adam mentioned (an off-hand comment really in the car) that he wanted to walk through Henrietta again for memories sake, and who was Ronan to deny him.

So they walked, arms barely strained from the weight of Ronan’s dirty jeans and Opal’s new fleece sweaters, out of sync but slowly growing accustomed to each other’s pace.

Every time the bag jostled between them, Ronan grew an awful itch to hold Adam’s hand, swinging casually from the bag’s handle. He looked so gentle then, glowing like a vision in the night illuminated by the warm street lamps and car headlights. Lambent, the reflection of domesticated forest fires and hearths in the irses of his eyes.

And Adam looked godly, holy, untouchable, every adjective Ronan has shouted in between church pews blackout drunk at three am to drown out his guilt, when he acted the most human. In awe, shining with nostalgia as they relieved their teens through the quiet streets. Never looked more beautiful than when he was looking away, with the hollow of his neck sculpted against the passing store windows and the roll of his back whenever he shifted the weight of the dirty clothes on his shoulder.

Oh it was torture. The inability for their hands not to brush because the handles were too far apart. Ronan could imagine the back of their palms kissing, could imagine feeling Adam’s pulse as if it were his own when their veins pressed against each other.

“We’re here,” Adam announced, pulling Ronan’s head out of the water, the real world rushing by again.

They enter the tiny building, run down without anyone else around yet, hands that should be touching but were painfully not.

The moon taunted him, reminded Ronan of every romantic stereotype that taught him this was the part where he kissed Adam. Framed by the large laundromat window, silver lighting fighting with the fluorescence coming from inside the stripped-down building. The gentle buzz of washing machines and vending machines working at once, rattling and alive, the fans slow and useless in cooling Ronan down.

They haul the clothes into a washing machine, huffing with mild effort considering how long Ronan had put off washing all of Opal’s newer clothes gifted from Blue for weeks now. Adam grins, shaking his head and hair falling over his eyes as he rested his hands on his hips in satisfaction. Ronan puts coins in the machine, the domesticity of the quaint laundromat torturing him.

Adam looks up at him from between lashes, lips quirked like an arrow piercing straight through Ronan, an image ripped out straight from a depressing, new-adult fairy tale.

They were alone in the laundromat.

Ronan wanted to kiss him.

He swerved awkwardly around Adam and pressed wash dry instead, the tumbling laundry in cycles mocking him for his inability to change, to clean himself from this awful gut-twisting romance infesting his body.

Adam sighs, the moment broken, Ronan clutches tightly onto the washing machine.

They don’t talk once on the walk back, the bag much lighter now that his laundry was clean and dry, warm enough for Adam too, the heat radiating from the fabric onto their hands still fresh from the dryer.

Ronan had so much to say, so much to show, so many secrets to expose. He continues to keep them to himself.

Cicatrize was a verb to describe the process of healing by forming a scar.

Ronan was the noun for it. Constantly cicatrizing, disinfecting the wound from pus and rot that grew like pests around his nimble heart.

The night Niall Lynch died, his middle son died along with him.

On the day of his funeral, his middle son was buried in the same plot on their family’s property, and he’s been trying to dig himself out of the inherited dirt ever since.

Now, fifteen years later, with Opal in his lap as they lay sprawled on the couch together, all three of them, too close for Ronan’s liking, he knew he was alive. He had never died, he survived death and spat in his face out of spite. His love for the people in his life was his final act of defiance.

Sometimes people forget that cemeteries are gardens too.

Opal sat squirming as always so Ronan nudges her gently, asking her what crawled up her butt. She sticks her tongue out at him. Adam laughs a short breath.

Ronan was trying very hard to keep his eyes trained on the tv.

How badly he wanted this every night. 

Adam fed Opal popcorn piece by piece, Opal obediently opening her mouth for more as they watched some stupid disney movie about a talking llama. He had only been sleeping over for one night and Opal had already grown attached to him.

(She wasn’t the only one.)

Ronan watches the blue light cast on both of their faces, unguarded and happy, instead of the tv. Contentment like he’s never experienced before settling deep inside his bones. It felt like a scene he had to memorise second by second before it would eventually escape him like rain between his fingers.

That night, Adam was the one to hold Ronan.

Opal tucked into bed an hour ago, Ronan tries not to make into a big deal as he slept one more night on the same mattress with Adam Parrish.

The proper word for it was an embrace but admitting it would only make them both stop, an action Ronan should go through but desperately didn’t want to. Like shifting gears on the BMW on open roads. The brakes were right there but Ronan never knew when to stop, gasoline in his veins refusing to let him have any control on the direction they were heading.

So Ronan would, only in his head, call it cradling, like Adam used to on nights when Ronan could not separate his anger from his grief.

Cradling was safe, it was neutral enough for it to be acceptable between two friends but intimate enough for Ronan to consider each brush of Adam’s skin to be a metanoia.

“How did you know I’m not married?” Ronan whispered to the darkness, the strong hold Adam had around his waist that dipped down dangerously to his hips the only sign he was still there and real.

“No wedding ring,” Adam mumbled close enough to be into Ronan’s shoulder. That would be too tender though, too close to a mimic of lovers in a relationship, so Adam muffles his sleepy voice into the pillow instead.

Ronan couldn’t decide whether to be grateful or disappointed.

“So?” Ronan continued, tying his own noose with the shared blankets protecting their fragile bodies and church stained glass hearts, “Plenty of married people don’t wear rings.”

“Not you though.”

Adam yawns against Ronan’s neck, the air at the edge of Ronan’s buzzcut warm along with every match stricken goosebump on Ronan’s arm. Adam carefully reached for Ronan’s hand in the dark, his fingers rubbing the empty space tenderly where an engagement ring should be.

“And what makes you think I’m not fucking anyone?” Ronan asks just to be crude, to feel Adam flinch behind him. Digging his dog teeth into Adam’s neck in warning.

_You want me back, it means even the worst parts._

Adam answers steadily, no sign of disgust or shame in his voice. A younger Ronan Lynch used to be obsessed with this facade Adam seemed to master, always pushing far enough in fascination to see his breaking point.

He would get irritated, yes, maybe snarl back at Ronan with venom colder than glaciers drifting from the arctics, but Ronan had never seen Adam without his pride or control.

A sudden awful urge to get under Adam’s skin overwhelms Ronan. Adam, as if knowing exactly what Ronan was trying, only huffs in disbelief.

“I know you would never let me in your bed if you were seeing someone else, Lynch,” Adam recited with false disinterest, tone purposefully flat, “You’re not that kind of person.”  
  
“Why are you acting like you know me so well, it’s been eleven fucking years, Parrish.”

Ronan wanted to scream into his pillow, wanted to drive far into the fields on the way to Singer’s Fall without speed limits until all the tension in his bones surrenders to the night sky. There was nothing stopping him from setting the entire universe on fire.

Except for Adam Parrish’s thumb rubbing slow circles into the sides of his torso, dangerously close to his hip bones, calming him down like a god reciting prayer with a rosary.

“Am I wrong?”

Silences with Adam always felt deafening, a pressure high enough to make any object explode. But when he spoke it was always followed by the ringing of a recently pulled trigger.

Ronan shoves his face into his palms like he was about to pray for forgiveness, retreating the spikes on his spine back into his flesh so he wouldn’t stab Adam as they slept like lovers should.

“Fuck you, Parrish,” was all he could bear to spit out without serving his heart on a silver platter. His traitorous body melted against Adam like a pat of butter being cut by a hot knife, the ink crawling all over his skin like vines eager to drown Adam in its dark sea and intertwining them into one singular body with the same pulse in rhythm.

“Sweet dreams, Lynch,” was all Adam knew Ronan could bear to hear.


	5. are you waiting to touch me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kinda short because this was actually 1/4 of the original chapter 5 draft but i Am Too Mentally Ill To Edit The Full Thing (i just figured Something was better than nothing)

Ronan dreamt that night.

His dreams as a child were filled with mostly illegible noise buzzing around a single light source that never got revealed to him, even now as a man in his late twenties. His subconscious trying to reach for him with its arm outstretched, showing him all these symbols and pretty tarot cards Ronan didn’t understand enough to interpret. 

_ Secrets _ , they promised him, an entire mountain range of them in the stormy empire of his mind. Waiting to be harvested, the civilisation that nurtured them praying to the same god which Ronan worshipped. Golden and bitter, so many secrets to unearth.

The dream starts like most of his dreams do. A place located nowhere with nothing and no one. A senseless void with cold air biting at his skin, begging for him to reign over his rightful throne in the labyrinth behind his eyelids after surrendering it to the much more powerful conquering of cheap booze in his youth. 

This was his kingdom. The heavy crown on his head leaves his neck cramped, tightening and cutting the blood circulation to his brain.

_ Let go _ , no one says. Ronan hears it anyways and willfully removes his hands off the steering wheel of control. It feels like flying. It hurts like drowning. The voice, the fictional god, had a southern lilt Ronan physically could not rebel against.

The dream then goes somewhere familiar. The scent of lavender fields and his mother’s spice rack overwhelms his senses. His body lurches to the ground before his heart can escape his throat. The skip of a record player, the track long over. The ghost of footsteps thumping over aged wood, mopped with house brand lemon formula. Ronan could feel his feet give in, falling to his knees.

He twists his head to the door, watching numbly as it creaks open, inviting as sunlight pours in. Ronan runs out the mirror of his childhood home (missing any photographs or warmth) before the voice even tells him to.

He’s walked the muddy driveway all his life.

If forced to identify the grass outside the Barns, Ronan would be able to do it by scent alone. The dew out here always filled his lungs differently, as if he was drinking it down his throat instead of merely inhaling the water vapour that kept the entire farmland humid during the summertime.

So Ronan walks down the dirt path, farther and farther away from the dreamt comfort he had willed into existence for himself, until his bare feet hit the smooth surface of a cobblestone path, slippery and wet.

The fairytale sun begins to dim drastically into cold cobalt darkness. The soil under his feet is no longer welcoming, no longer pulsing and alive against his skin. Shards of glass sprout between the gravel, cutting open the soles of his feet, leaving a trail of blood like a red river the deeper he slips further into the eerie nightmare street.

It seemed like the air got thinner the longer he walked on. Suffocating. If a person could die from lonesomeness, Ronan would drop dead now in his sleep.

His entire life, his mother, his brothers, his friends, his daughter, they seemed so unreachable in the strange dream. Like Ronan would never see them again even though he knew, logically, he would when he woke up soon.

Logic had no place here. 

He drops to his knees like in prayer and crawls the rest of the way out of instinct. Like a rabid dog, all teeth and no thoughts. Just a carnal need to run from something he could not name.

Helplessness. There was no fucking end to this torturous yellow brick road. No endgame. No goal. No reason. Just his mind taking the piss out of him by stabbing his metaphysical dream fuckery body.

There’s a horrible ticking sound like an unreachable itch in the back of his skull, the sound bouncing around chambers and echoing back his misery. Ronan wanted nothing more than to rip his fucking head off his neck with his blunt fingernails caked in dirt.

The cold seeps underneath his skin. The nightmare expands larger than he can comprehend and expands insistently against his lungs, cutting off the oxygen going to his filthy hands dragging him forward the isolated street. No buildings surrounding the sides. No town. No life. A barren hellscape trying to tell him something in a language he refused to listen to.

There’s a street lamp not far ahead.

The only one he’s seen all night, the presence of it finally alerting Ronan of how dark everything was before the existence of it. Underneath, it a figure stands against the rusted metal, a marlboro red between his lips and no shadow to be found.

Ronan didn’t have to squint to know who it was.

But Adam looked wrong in the glow of the isolated street lamp, features gaunt like an orphan and unsettlingly blank, the sight of him made Ronan’s mouth taste like decay. The face of a saint, just missing the arrows protruding out his feeble body.

Ronan runs to him, like he always did. Like he always will. Even as the glass stabs him deeper into his dream flesh. They crash like an accident onto the pavement, a creature melted into one single entity made of nothing but busted engines and cheap gasoline. The hard stone, unforgiving and lifeless, sprouts grass as soft as the fields at the Barns. The strange light around them together, Ronan couldn’t get away, staring down at Adam like he was god admiring his creation.

The worship was all wrong, it would never be like this. So Ronan tumbles them around, the concrete on his back felt like evergreen grass again, like the beginning of the dream, bathing himself in the way Adam’s clever eyes studied him like radiation. His fingertips ghost over the hollow of Ronan’s neck. The ocean behind his eyelids evaporated into the rain and fell, sliding down Adam’s flushed cheeks even though Ronan was the one crying. 

A stream of red runs down from Adam’s nostril down to his lips, staining his straight teeth and handsome smile crimson, even though Ronan could smell the rust on his knuckles and feel the dampness of blood in his own mouth. His feet no longer ached but everything else did.

The strangeness was awful, making Ronan sick.

“Too bad neither of us smoke, huh?” Adam jokes, his voice hollow and echoing. Like it was in Ronan’s head instead of leaving Adam’s lips.

Ronan stares, wordlessly, down at the other man. Younger. His body smaller. Closer to the boy he once knew than the man he knows now. Adam grins up at him, blinding and charming, even with his gums bloody red.

Adam, because he was not Adam but Ronan’s memory of him, smiled like he knew Ronan’s secret. Because he did. And he then tossed his lit cigarette to the side and set the grass with the both of them on fire.

Ronan crashed their awful mouths full of canine teeth together.

Cinnamon filled his jaw, rough and raw as he swallowed it all down at once without thinking. Sweetness to the point it was disgusting, Ronan was suffocating, every cell in his dream body vibrating until he caught on fire. Above him, Adam burned and burned, his own jaw slack. Angelic. Awful.

Then the floor underneath their bodies shook, an earthquake that brought them back to the Barns, a secluded area bathed in pale moonlight surrounded by overgrown wheat Ronan kept promising his mother he would trim but never did. A dark kingdom for teenage boys to run off to away from newfound feelings an ache they couldn’t put a name to yet, creating intricate rituals fighting in the fields like sheepdogs, making up games and coming up with excuses to feel each other’s skin. A place they would never be caught.

Adam’s face, one moment brighter than the sun suddenly painfully blank, starts to morph like a moth in its cocoon, the confused furrow of his eyebrows and the shock in his eyes. The disgusted frown on his lips.

Ronan had seen that look before. He tastes tar on his tongue.

So he tries to look away but the cruel dream brings him back to that night, except this time his head could no longer turn, his body was no longer under his reign. He was forced to stare at Adam helplessly, watching how his friend’s shoulders tensed in distrust like Ronan was a stranger instead of the boy he slept beside dutifully for three years.

Neither of them had the option to run from his head, prisoners of this nightmare. They couldn’t run this time around.

Adam couldn’t leave. Ronan couldn’t scream at him to go.

“Lynch,” Adam says simply, although his voice sounded much too heavy. A martyr ready for death. Ronan shudders, ready to weep blood again just like the last time.

The dreams always ended like this. Ronan wasn’t sure why he thought it’d be any different this time.

Ronan woke up in a cold sweat.

Rushing a hand over his beating heart as he heaved alone in the dark. In his dream, slow and torturous, it seemed like the useless organ didn’t exist. Awake and alive, he felt like he was breaking the surface of the water after drowning for so long. Running six times as fast to make up for the fact that he’s ignored it all through the night. 

Beside him, Adam slept, his torso twisted away from Ronan like he couldn’t bear to be near him even subconsciously. 

The bedsheets wrapped around their lonely bodies like tidal waves, a vengeful sea ready to drag both of them down. Adam shifts, his arm brushing against Ronan’s lap. He blinks wearily up, hair a wreck and face confused. Ronan stares back down, a sailor beaconed by a siren by the jagged rocks.

“Lynch?” Adam asks, much more tenderly than in the dream.

When he said Lynch, it sounded like he was saying  _ dear _ . A senseless intimacy of last names between the two of them. Ronan only calls him Adam when he’s praying for forgiveness. Adam only calls him Ronan when he’s about to break his heart.

Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish was a strange creature made of eight limbs, two mouths, and one heart. Every organ intertwined by the thick roots of time growing around their entrapped bodies.

Two branches on the same tree, no matter how far apart they grew to chase different sources of lights, their origins and their bodies would always be connected unless either of them took a huge old fucking axe and cut the entire forest down to the ground.

In his dreams, Adam would always be the one holding an axe or a lighter.

Awake, all Adam held in his hands was Ronan’s face as he brought their eyes to the same line of sight. That furrow between his eyebrows Ronan understood was just concern for an old friend with a history of nightmares. It doesn’t stop him from wishing it was more than that. 

He frowns, softened at the edges by the night and age. A man with the same dimples and fullness swimming in his eyes that made Ronan fidget.

_ What are you thinking, always thinking. Lay your tired head on me. _

“Nightmare?” Adam sighed instead of asking. He already knew. Ronan didn’t bother nodding, focusing too much on shifting his eyes away subtly from the shadow of Adam’s eyelashes under his eyebags.

When they were younger, nineteen, freshly wounded and sulking, Gansey tried to get Ronan into astronomy. They would watch the sky like they did as freshmen. Ronan didn’t care much for it but Gansey seemed hyperfixated enough to leave Ronan’s untouched repression alone. So he indulged his friend, staring mindlessly at hot rocks that sparked as bright as the firecracker that was Adam and his curled lip.

Ronan had an interest in space but only if the space was next to Adam Parrish. If the freckles that littered over the bridge of his nose formed constellations, Ronan would be an astronaut. Anything to get closer.

Cosmos and planets. Infinite universes. An endless milky way.

They would always end up here. In each other’s orbits.

Sometimes, on good nights when Opal slept next to him, Ronan dreamt about being a god with the ability to remove a ring from Saturn and slipping it over Adam’s boyish knuckle instead.

The frown on Adam’s lips deepens further. He can’t possibly know Ronan was thinking of marrying him now of all times, vulnerably pressed against each other in the same bed. What a shitty time to be yearning.

Adam nudges his shins gently underneath the shared blanket. That determination clear on his face even as it softens with worry and guilt. The hand stroking his cheek slithers like the serpent who tempted Eve down to Ronan’s shoulders before blunt fingernails start to scratch soothing circles at the base of his neck.

_ Adam’s hugging him _ , Ronan thinks too late to pull back. Every sense in his body flashed neon warning signs at him to pull away and run out the door.

“I didn’t know you still got nightmares,” Adam whispered soothingly, only managing to make Ronan’s ire worse.

_ How could you have known when you aren’t even fucking here _ , he wanted to spit out. He wanted to scream and tear Adam’s hands off of him. Doesn’t he know what he was doing to Ronan just by existing? What a horribly wonderful thing to offer him.

“Can’t sleep without you here,” Ronan groans instead, Adam’s face buried in the side of his neck. They looked like boys from heaven’s view. Lonely and scared with unspoken secrets, innocently with hands around shoulders and arms around waists. Holding each other like friends do before they start high school. When touch was much less complicated.

He needs this. He wants this. He hates this. He lets himself have this.

So Ronan surrenders instead of starting a war of acidic words, slumping into the warmth of Adam’s arms like a pat of butter melting in a hot pan. The voice with the Henrietta accent in his head quiets down and slumbers peacefully. Ronan follows soon after, his eyelids fluttering shut as his skin caught on fire.

He doesn’t dream again that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hate 😳 my writing babes 😳 sorry this one is so short and took so long, ill try to update the next chapter sooner


	6. mom i'm tired

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> didn't i promise a faster chapter or what ?? this time with maurora, i am never going back to writing about men ever again (a lie, but i do love these ladies very much)

Adam gives Ronan a strange look through the car window.

Ronan stares back, lips pushed into a neutral line as he fidgets by nervously chewing his nails. He’s never seen that look before on Adam’s face, never had the chance to understand what it meant.

They were alone in the motel’s barren carpark.

Technically not completely alone since Opal was dozing off in the back seat, mind-numbingly watching the tiny screen of her pink 3DS that Matthew gave her last Christmas, but it was lonely enough.

Adam should’ve checked in by now and Ronan should already be halfway to the bakery, but they stood there in a stalemate, pleading eyes and twisted lips.

Two slow dancers, last one’s out.

So Adam stands there, surrounded by dusty gravel and clutching his backpack to his chest, wearing Ronan’s clothes, and Ronan stays still, waiting for the moment Adam leaves him again (no matter how temporary).

Adam clears his throat, kicking the loose asphalt with the toe of his nice oxfords, “Right, thanks for ya’ know.... letting me stay over.”

Ronan nods tersely in reply, embarrassed by the nights he spent curled around Adam’s spine they refused to admit to the morning after. He didn’t trust himself enough to _not_ ask Adam to stay forever.

So he bites hard down on his tongue, wishing the blood from his gums was Adam’s spit instead.

“Whatever, just come early for your shift.”

“When am I not,” Adam jokes awkwardly, Ronan gives him a hard look. As if he didn’t know he was eleven years too late to destroy Ronan’s entire life.

The funny look on Adam’s face doesn’t subdue, even after he tucks his hair behind his ears and knocks on Opal’s window to say goodbye. Ronan doesn’t say a word, tries to block out Opal begging him not to leave. Ronan knew Adam Parrish was birthed just to leave. 

“Bye, Lynch,” Adam sighed, turning around and entering the ancient doors of the last minute motel.

Only when they were far enough down the road Adam wouldn’t be able to see the BMW from his room window, did Ronan realise he’s never actually heard Adam say goodbye to him for as long as they’ve known each other.

The thought was enough to make Ronan want to set the entire state of Virginia on fire. Along with the thought that he’ll have to wash his sheets soon before he’ll grow attached to Adam’s scent in the fabric at the laundromat that’ll always remind Ronan of the other man.

Ronan has never missed him more.

The drive to the Barns always felt surreal.

The moment he turns the ignition to the beemer, it felt like he was fully and willingly allowing himself to be submerged in a painting of fresh greens and gentle daylight.

His heart swells every inch he drives closer home, his body electric with love as miles of fields whizzes by through the windows. Rivers of asphalt beaconing him back to Singer’s Fall.

In the backseat, Opal sprawls lazily across the leather, half asleep with her chin perched on partially open window, enjoying the breeze and the fresh air.

He wasn’t planning on taking her along at first. Not when he had Adam back in Henrietta doing whatever he was fucking doing in his spare time, not that it was any of Ronan’s business, to keep an eye on her.

In fact, he had offered to take Opal to the skating rink when Ronan visited him at his motel room, always missing him, creating any excuse to see him again.

That time was to drop off groceries he had _accidentally_ bought too much of.

“She’ll be a handful.”

“Just like her father," Adam joked outside his door, his eyes softening in the corners, "I can handle it.”

And Ronan tried to make sense of Adam Parrish’s patience, how a boy filled with so much rage that it challenged Ronan’s own ire, could be so full of it. They were two matches that burned in different ways but no less bright than the other.

In that moment, time felt like a distance. An ocean to be crossed without a bridge long enough to reach each other. Ronan could see the other side with a sturdy telescope but he will never be able to live those eleven years apart. All he could do was ask and wonder silently how did those eleven years managed to raise Adam Parrish into the stranger he was now. 

All they had were endings, the past wasn’t made for them. 

“Or we could take her together another day, Sunday if you're free?”

Ronan had _now_. That’s all he ever had when living the next minute seemed like too much work. And right now he would like to walk beside Adam Parrish to a run-down ice rink downtown, holding hands with Opal between them.

Adam nodded in understanding, Ronan couldn't tear his eyes off of him. They were alone. Ronan could've kissed him right there and then. The look on Adam's face, blue light from the dirty swimming pool in the centre of all the rooms reflecting in his eyes, the water too cold to swim in, was one of patience.

He was waiting for something, all while keeping his gaze locked on Ronan.

Ronan couldn't figure it out. Was terrified to know what it was. Only knowing he wanted to lock lips with Adam Parrish there and then, like he always did. Constantly thinking about the pretty curve of his mouth.

Ronan needed to kiss him.

He of course didn't.

“Grandma says you should always keep your eyes on the road,” Opal snarked in a bored tone, the skull cap she refused to be parted from now a makeshift pillow instead of being at risk from flying off her hair.

Ronan shook his head out of the memory, an amused grin on his lips as he watched her through the rearview mirror only to see she was already smirking back, looking more and more like his biological child with his venom, “Well your grandma isn’t the best street racer in Henrietta.”

“Oh? Do you know who is?”

Ronan huffs, a laugh more disbelieving than irritated. It was nice to know Maura was at least raising her with grit seeing how she seemed to be inheriting Blue’s quick tongue.

“Shut up I’m trying to concentrate on the road.”

Opal blows a raspberry at him, rolling down the window to stick her head out and watch the roaming cows.

Now was all he needed.

In a castle of lies filled with love and warmth that Ronan Lynch ached for, his mother lived alone with all her sons raising families of their own miles away. 

As the only brother left in Henrietta, it went unsaid that it was Ronan’s responsibility to check on her weekly.

Aurora Lynch, even after the death of her husband, stands smiling on the porch like a fairytale princess, arms wide open for a hug even before Ronan leaves the car.

She was smiling, her lips curled into a youthful grin inherited by her youngest son. Her greying blonde curls fell over her shoulders and shaded by a cozy looking farmer's hat, decorated with spring flowers by her current girlfriend.

Ronan was just glad she was still strong enough to welcome him home with a smile after the death of his father and dealing with her post grieving traumatic stress disorder.

"Hey soldier boy, caused any shenanigans lately?" said girlfriend greets him with a punch to his shoulder before scooping Opal in her arms, surprisingly strong for a forty seven year old woman.

"New flannel? Very butch of you," Ronan snipes back with a grin, earning himself a pinch to his cheek from Maura as his mother tugs him down to her chest, keeping him close to his heart.

“God, I’m exhausted,” Ronan groaned just as Aurora wraps her frail arms around his neck, burying his face in the mess of her honeysuckle hair. The curls of his black tattoo touched so tenderly by her hands, the same hands that bathed him and cooked for him, bandaged him up when he fell from trees and swiped the tears from under his lashes, it made something awful in Ronan settle down.

Hugging his mother was coming home. Even if he had nothing else left, this would be enough. She constantly smelled like vanilla, a new dessert always in her oven, and nature. A childhood spent rolling in the grass and fresh laundry left outside to dry.

Ronan allowed himself a split second to smile with his face hidden in her neck.

"Hi mom," he says tiredly, heart full and warm.

"Welcome back, baby," she hums, smoothing out his eyebrows with her thumb, "How was the drive? Have you eaten? Did you enjoy the pie last week? Tell me how's business at the bakery?"

Ronan shakes his head, promising her he'll tell her everything once they've all gone inside. 

"So how are you doing, my little seal?" Aurora asks, mischief in her voice.

Ronan swallowed dryly, watching as his mother started boiling water in a frog-shaped kettle on the stove.

He knew he looked out of place in the Barn's kitchen, dressing in all black but surrounded by hand mended quilts made by Blue with little chickens on them and drowning in his mother's Rosalind McAllister vinyl playing, but he didn't _feel_ out of place.

After all, this was his father's space too. And Ronan is nothing but his father's mirror.

"Fine fine, everything's fine. The bakery is fine, Opal is fine. How was your last doctor's appointment?" Ronan huffed to avoid the topic.

Aurora gave him a strange look, hands on her apron at her hips, eyebrow raised in suspicion, "Uh huh, and?"

Ronan bit on his lip, fidgeting by twisting his wristbands around his fingers until they turned white. He never lied, the main difference between him and the man that shared his middle name, but he especially never lied to his mother.

The sound of Aurora's blunt knife hitting the chopping board was deafening in the mostly quiet house. In the next room, Maura and Opal laughed loudly as the older woman taught his daughter how to knit sweaters for the goats. It still didn't compare to the bass of Ronan's heartbeat.

He knew Aurora was aware there was something off about him but he also knew Aurora would never force him to tell her anything. She gave him the option to keep his secrets.

He didn't want to keep secrets just to keep Adam.

"You have to promise me you won't make a big deal out of it."

Aurora nodded slowly, grabbing him by his wrists and rubbing soothing circles with her thumb. Ronan was suddenly reminded to when he was sixteen, coming out to her in the middle of the night, terrified that his only living parent wouldn't accept it despite how ridiculous the thought sounded to him now.

Aurora Lynch's love was infinite.

“Parrish’s back”

“ _Adam Parrish?_ "

Aurora dropped the chopping board in the sink, scrambling to pick up the minced garlic before it all fell down the drain.

Ronan rushed out of his seat to help her, the two of them laughing as they tried to salvage the mess. Ronan took over the knife, assuring his mother he knew how to prepare mushroom soup and garlic bread, why else would she trust him with the bakery.

She hummed, full of thought, watching her girlfriend and her granddaughter bond over endless balls of yarn. Ronan nervously waited for her questions, letting his hands take control as he allowed his mind to wander to what Adam was up to right now.

Sometimes, Ronan forgot just the enormity of the Adam shaped hole in his life was. Yeah he managed just fine without him, fine enough to forget him and carry on with his life, raising up his daughter and running his mother's business, but it all felt like a cover up. A shiny new city built on a crumbling ancient civilization, awoken at any mention of their dead gods.

And sometimes he forgot how much Henrietta missed Adam too. His mother didn't frown but there was an off look on her face, hazy, just like how Ronan felt. A corner of her lip quirked in nostalgia, a painful turn in-between her fair eyebrows.

Sometimes Ronan forgets his mother loved Adam just as much as he did.

She puts a hand on his shoulder like she was about to collapse. Ronan understood, didn't comment on it as he dumped the ingredients in a big pot. Adam was her employee but she treated him like a son, worried over him the same way she fretted over Ronan. Her darling stray. 

Ronan regrets every word he'd shouted to Adam's face, at least for Aurora's sake.

When Ronan turned to her, she was misty eyed. Far off, wearing the same face she used to put on while grieving her husband. Ronan knew. It was as if Adam had died, never coming back.

So he kissed her hand like he used to do between her embroidery breaks. She gives him a feeble smile, running her flat palm over his buzzcut, and cupping his cheek in silent agreement before going back to the present, smile much more content now that her eyes were on Maura again.

All they had was now.

It wasn't a big deal. Ronan didn't have to make it into a big deal. His mom knew his childhood crush he was heartbroken about is back in Henrietta. 

At least she didn't have to know about the nights they shared a bed together.

“You know?" Aurora sighed, leaning against the counter and turning her head away from Maura and Opal to stare at Ronan with concern,"I never understood why he seemed to just disappear.”

Ronan cleared his throat and said nothing, just finely slicing the mushrooms in silence. 

Because that was _their_ secret.

Lynches were notorious for their secrets. Maybe it was their strong jaws or the reputation of their father still haunting them long after his death, it was something about their tight lips and cold eyes that made you think they were harbouring secrets.

_Forget about it, Parrish_

He told Adam to forget about it eleven years ago, only a week from the day he was leaving. Terrified and horrible, the feeling Ronan had mistaken for anger caused a major fight between the both of them in the middle of the fields of the Barns. Adam had snarled with his entire body and Ronan, with his dog teeth and words of poison, had cut deep under Adam's thick skin.

_Forget about it, Parrish_

Ronan never thought he'd take it so literally.

"I miss him," Aurora said instead of asking about Ronan's feelings, a gesture that helped the tension in Ronan's shoulders release.

"Me too," Ronan replied, voice hoarse, the _every fucking damn day_ went unsaid, "you should see him ma, nothing like the old scrawny mechanic apprentice you knew."

Aurora sighed, a sorrowful grin on her lips, shooing Ronan away from the stove to take over cooking duty, "Yeah, I'd like that."

Ronan tsked as he set the table with plates, the entire house smelling like the fresh garlic bread from the oven and rosemary, his mother laughing bright and young behind him with the steaming pot in her hands, "What the fuck did you do to my daughter?"

Maura rolled her eyes as she went to kiss her girlfriend on her cheek in gratitude, Opal strolling in behind her covered from head to toe in stickers all over her skin and multiple braids embellished with plastic butterfly clips in her hair, fingernails painted sneakily in the bisexual flag colours.

"Normal girl things," Maura shrugged, voice muffled in Aurora's neck.

"You aren't raising her to be like Blue."

"I like Aunt Blue though!" Opal piped in, showing Ronan her new sparkly nail polish, the other hand painted in rainbow colours instead. "She's super cool unlike you."

It was Ronan's turn to roll his eyes, dumping her in her chair and fixing up a bowl of soup for her, pointedly trying to avoid looking in his mother's direction.

"I'm _cool_ , I'll let you pierce your septum like me next year."

Aurora gave him a little shake of her head in disbelief, like she didn't agree but knew she couldn't stop him regardless, clearing her throat to get everyone to settle down.

Ronan sees how she links her hands with Maura on the table, suppressing the grin that was threatening to appear on his face. Maura would tell Calla and Calla would never let him down.

Behind here in the kitchen he grew up with, having lunch with the people he loved most made Ronan semi excited for Thanksgiving when Matthew and even _Declan_ would drive in from DC.

He might even bring _Adam_ along this year.

The thought makes him nervous and giddy, an awful thing that makes him feel embarrassed for his own thoughts. Like a teenager again, hopelessly pinning.

As if able to read his thoughts, Maura gives him a teasing grin as she lazily took a bite from her garlic bread, "So, when are we going to be meeting him?"

"What the fuck?" Ronan spluttered, burning his tongue on the hot soup. Opal laughs at him loudly, at least his mother had the decency to hide her amused grin behind her hand.

"That weird dreamy look on your face is disgusting, I just assumed it was about a boy," Maura snorted, "And it seems I'm _right_."

"Oh, you mean _Adam_?" Opal, the traitor, supplies for him in a mocking love-sick voice, her hand pressed to her forehead dramatically, "He looks like that everyday when Adam was around at home with us."

Ronan spluttered, even more flustered than before. Maura, looking more and more like an evil mastermind in Ronan's eyes, gave him a devilish smile from across the embroidered tablecloth.

" _Adam_ , huh?"

"They aren't dating, dear," Aurora informed with a knowing look towards Ronan's direction. The _yet_ was heavily implied. "But Ronan is bringing him around for dinner sometime, _right?_ "

"Yeah," Ronan coughed into his bowl, keeping his head low as all the three ladies turned to look at him expectantly, mischief in varying degrees in all their eyes, "Yeah, of course."

"You'd love him, dear," Aurora continued, purposefully glancing at Ronan the more she spoke about Adam, "He's a real sweetheart, actually helped around the bakery unlike Ronan here."

Ronan made a sound of protest in reply, pretending to be busy with feeding Opal even though the tiny brat doesn't save him by sticking her tongue out playfully. He repays in kind, gently placing her favourite hat over her braids.

Maura's grin doesn't turn anymore merciful, perching her chin in her hand and staring at Ronan too, "Oh yeah? sounds like a real dream boat. Is he handsome too?"

"Jesus Christ I don't know why I bother coming around while you're here."

Maura cackles loudly, full of life and amused, giving him a sly look. She knew he was avoiding answering her question. Ronan decided flipping off an elderly lady would not be worth the nagging from his mother nor his co-worker.

His mother gave him a warning about using the lord's name in vain but her lips still crinkled upwards. She raises a piece of bread to her fiance's lips and Maura finally stops ribbing Ronan over Adam.

Ronan was grateful for her intervention but still had to flicker his gaze away, the sight too domestic for him to handle.

And like that the conversation turned to Opal's school. Ronan sat back, watching the scene from outside his body, trying to savour the fullness he felt. The two ladies coddled over his daughter and Ronan was glad he could at least provide this to Opal in absence of a second parent. She might only have one dad but at least she got two grandmas who loved her dearly. He wonders what Adam would think of him now, softened and bursting with adoration.

He might even give this version of Ronan a chance.

His silent stupor breaks when he suddenly laughs, amused by Opal proudly telling her grandmas she has detention on Sunday for foul language towards another student and Ronan has to meet his teachers for the third time this semester.

Her smugness made it all the funnier, Aurora concerned while Maura gave her a high five. Ronan shook his head with pride, promising to take her to the skating rink with Adam after the meeting.

The sun was barely in the sky when Opal yawned and Ronan had decided it was time to head back.

She glared at him and whined about not being able to stay the night. Ronan knew it was mostly for show, since she loved her room and the ability to annoy Ronan in the middle of the night. Still, his mother scooped her arm in her arms and gave her a tight hug and a kiss to her temple, promising her she can always stay the holidays.

As Opal ran into Maura's arms next, Ronan gave his mother a fervent hug. She sighed and pushed Ronan's head closer to her body. Just feeling her alive in his arms made Ronan exhale slowly, shakily, he wouldn't know what to do if he had lost her too.

"I know, baby, I know."

She whispers to him under her breath, airily like the fae from hair father's old bedtime stories. 

"I miss your hair," She says at last, holding Ronan's face tenderly in her hands, stroking his shaved his head the same way she used to with his old full head of dark curls. He wonders what she sees. The ghost of her husband blinking tiredly down at her? Or her soldier son shoved into a war he wasn't prepared to live through?

She sniffles, pressing her face to his cheek and kisses his temple. Ronan hums, not trusting his voice not to crack, hugging her closer like she might slip through his fingers anytime.

"Take care of yourself, I love you."

Ronan nodded, pressing a kiss to both her cheeks and whispering he loved her back.

Maura hugged him too, briefly, but Ronan didn't push her away.

"Take care of my mom."

Without a hint of teasing in her tone, Maura replied sincerely, "I will until the day I die."

Ronan kinda loved her too.

The two ladies watched him from the porch, connected at the hip and fingers twisted together in between them, as Ronan placed the leftovers and pie Aurora baked specifically for Adam in the backseat.

They waved a final goodbye when Ronan finally entered the driver seat, Aurora shouting a final promise to bring Adam over sometime. Ronan grunted, a twitch in the corner of his lip. Beside him, Opal shouted loudly her last goodbye back and didn't stop shouting out the window until Ronan had driven far enough their shouts were no longer heard among the settling darkness.

He didn't smile but he knew his face was much less tense than it had been in the morning.

"When did you and Adam meet?" Opal asked suddenly, her face facing the window to watch the night sky take over the wide open fields.

She had her chin perched on the dashboard, twisting her painted nails, a habit inherited from Ronan.

Ronan flickered his gaze to her, decided not to answer until they've passed a particular spot among the tall grass, and sighed.

"Many dreams ago."

The answer didn't make much sense but Opal didn't comment on it, only humming in understanding the farther Ronan drove them away from Singer's Fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> spot the taylor swift reference 🤠 also not much adam this time round but y'all get Extra Adam And Opal Fun Time content next chapter (+ the gansey)


	7. i'll take anything you wanna give me, baby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kinda cliche romantic movie shit

Gansey was over at his place today because worrying over Ronan was the other man’s favourite hobby.

Ronan didn’t see him around as often ever since he started travelling around the globe, seeking knowledge or whatever he fucking called spending months breathing in ashes from dank tombs underground.

Occasionally, Ronan would take time out of his schedule to take Opal on short trips to whichever continent his best friend was in. Recently though, the youngest Gansey had settled back home in DC. They both knew it was temporary, seeing how Gansey couldn’t sit still without a new hyperfixation for years on end, but it was nice to be only a driving's distance away again.

Ronan doesn't say he misses him to his face, knocking his glasses up his nose fondly instead as a string of curses fall out of Gansey’s mouth.

Gansey gives him a crooked smile, knocking their caprisun packets together as a toast to their long distance brotherhood.

Opal, who had a habit of attaching herself onto anyone who Ronan approved of, showed him her stamp collection from the album he bought her last month as they all sat on the couch with instant pizza in their laps.

“Adam says he likes the ones with trees-”

The room freezes up, Opal blissfully unaware as Ronan tenses up with the questions about to leave Gansey’s lips.

“Adam?” Gansey turned to Ronan, thumb hooked in between his teeth like they were boys again, “Parrish?”

Ronan loved Gansey. It was a fact and it was easy to digest, a loyalty that didn’t leave Ronan sick and dizzy like the other boys in his life. 

And he surely missed Gansey, especially since they were both too busy with their respective lives to be connected by the hip anymore.

So yeah, Ronan appreciated Gansey driving down from DC and putting effort to make sure they never grew apart like he and Adam did.

But right now, as the concern and confusion grew further on Gansey’s handsome face, Ronan was appreciating it less and less by the second.

Everyone knew about Ronan’s little crush on Adam Parrish, even Adam Parrish himself. It was like a firework, all heat and vibrant colour that stung Ronan’s eyes if he stared at it too closely. Cupping the tenderness in his hands would only burn and scar his hands, creating ridges like canyons and puzzle pieces made to fit perfectly with Adam’s palms.

Ronan couldn't feel it quietly, attracting everyone's attention when he loved Adam loudly without words.

Gansey gave him a look, like he knew Ronan too well. Because he did. So Ronan tried to squirm his way out of this conversation by tensing up his shoulders like he was about to strike Gansey where it hurt if he even dared to prod the wound in Ronan’s chest.

“Yeah, Parrish,” Ronan mumbles, turning on the TV volume louder as if it was enough to get Gansey to drop the subject.

It was strange, everyone who knew him when he was friends with Adam talked about Adam as if he had died. And Ronan kept sounding like a widow when he annouced Adam was back to fuck his life up. He even kept getting the same look of pity.

Ronan was getting kinda sick of it.

Adam wasn't dead. He was breathing and alive unlike the boy Ronan knew when he was sixteen. He didn't rest six feet underground, he slept in a bed next to Ronan just because he missed him. His skin wasn't ashes kept in an urn over the fireplace, he was there to touch and hold and feel. His warmth was real underneath Ronan's palms.

It just wasn't allowed.

The rot he once was as a scrawny teenager too terrified to hold Ronan’s hand in broad daylight had fertilised the flowers blooming all over his ghost and now Ronan couldn't forget the memory of it even if he wanted to.

Selfishly, Ronan thought it would all be easier if he had died. Then at least his absence would be permanent and Ronan could learn to live with it. _Eventually_.

Gansey turns to him, still regal looking with pizza crumbs all over his lap and the blue hue radiating off his profile. Ronan gave him a warning glare to remove his finger off the trigger because neither of them were in the mood for a gun fight during their limited time together.

Gansey sighed, furrowing his eyebrows further in confusion. Ronan replied to the silent conversation with a firm shake of his head. 

He understood why Gansey was upset. Gansey knew how Adam up and left Ronan an entire decade ago. But Gansey didn't know the other half of it and Ronan was planning on dragging it to his grave. 

He was at a stalemate with himself currently, wondering why he wanted to tell the entire world Adam Parrish was an asshole but bite off the head of anyone who agreed with him. It was the sick sticky feeling he felt when he indulged himself by burying his face in Adam’s pillow until his heartbeat stopped racing.

He really didn't need Gansey to nag at him right now, not when everything he's stabilized in his life feels like it was knocked down by a huge tsunami.

Another sigh and a firm hand on his shoulder, Ronan sees how tired Gansey looks with his hair mussed up and mouth crooked by a grimace. 

“What are you denying yourself?”

Ronan wasn’t brave enough to answer that aloud.

He places another slice on Gansey's paper plate and tells him to shut the fuck up.

“I know what you’re doing, Richard dearest,” Ronan said as they stood in front of the bakery door, turning around to give Gansey a stern look, “Don’t you dare harass Parrish for leaving.”

Ronan agreed to this visit weeks ago over the phone, a miracle coming from him but his ringtone was specially specifically for Gansey’s calls. Gansey told him he needed to sort out the finance of the bakery with Henry. Ronan knew he was only physically at the bakery at Blue than actually get any work done. This was all before Adam barged in like a thunderstorm and Ronan hadn’t accounted by the fact that Gansey was as protective of him as he was of Gansey.

Gansey blushed at being caught, spluttering out excuses and arguements all while Ronan gave him a cool look that meant he didn’t give a single flying fuck and was tunning out from his nagging. Gansey huffed anyways, running a hand through his hair.

“I just don’t think it’s right that he just dipped on you like that! Even though he knew how much he meant to you!” Gansey shook his head, twisting his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger like the governor son he was raised to be. 

They stood at a stalemate outside, Gansey concerned and Ronan stubborn. His best friend sighed, gave him a squeeze on his shoulder. Ronan uncoiled himself like a serpent, allowing Gansey to anchor him.

“I just don’t want you hurt again.”

It was Ronan’s turn to sigh, deflated and suddenly feeling much older than he actually was. He understood, of course, why Gansey felt that way. Gansey’s been protecting him since they were boys who didn’t know anything more than creeks and empty roads to cycle down. Cushioning his fall for as long as he’s remembered, even when Ronan refused and burnt the entire town trying to stop Gansey from caring for something as volatile as him.

A murder weapon and his best friend.

He knew and he understood and yet he still stood his ground. Logically, he also knew Adam deserved it. Some cruel part of him that would forever remain bitter over the ash that Adam used to sit next to him in open fields, wanted Adam to bleed out like Ronan’s been doing at his altar for over a decade. 

The worst part of him, hopelessly and tragically in love with Adam Parrish, would never pray any harm his way.

He’s forgiven Adam and that was enough. Gansey gave him a pitying look like he didn’t agree but wouldn’t disobey Ronan’s limited requests, not when his friend never asked for much from him.

So Gansey nods. Ronan nods too before shoving him lightly in the arm, walking in to see the bakery already bustling with morning patrons ordering their coffee and pastry sides.

“Don’t test me, Dicky, I’ll fuck your sister.”

“You don’t even like women!”

And just like that, their banter went back to normal.

“You say that as if Helen has any standards in men,” Ronan shot back as he threw a balled up apron at his friend’s chest from the hooks on the wall, referring to the sweaty nicotine-addicted trashbag Helen Gansey had a brief affair with last summer. Gansey winced in defeat, nodding seriously in agreement that Helen _wouldn’t_ , in fact, be against diddling Ronan, gay or not.

They walk into the kitchen together, snickering about Helen’s exes like little girls swapping secrets. Blue gives him an offhanded wave, scowling and storming off when she sees Gansey at his arm. Gansey pouts like a scout boy and Ronan only shrugs in amusement as he assessed the chaos of his workspace (much better ever since Adam started working there again.)

“Is everythin’ alright here,” The man himself drawled right by Ronan’s ear just to be a little shit.

Both Ronan and Gansey jump in surprise, albeit for different reasons. Gansey was flustered as he collected himself, out reaching a hand towards Adam, who only raised an amused eyebrow at him. Ronan more so because Adam's lips were dangerously close to his jawline before he slides between the two of them to stand in front of Gansey.

“Hey Adam, hi hello, nice to see you again,” Gansey says with formal niceties lacing his voice, arm beginning to shake the longer Adam went just staring at the offered hand instead of taking it. Ronan was almost embarrassed for him except he was busy snickering at the nervous energy bubbling between them.

Adam shook his head, pulled Gansey by the arm and encompassed him into a warm hug instead, whispering something to Gansey Ronan didn’t bother catching.

“Don’t be weird,” That was directed at Gansey with an amused grin. “Hey, I already glazed the donuts,” That was directed at Ronan with a much softer smile.

He knew what he probably looked like to Gansey right now, starry eyed just because Adam understood how to run his dear bakery without Ronan having to tell him how. But it was the endearing way he looked at Ronan, soft eyes and flour ran through his hair, that made the embarrassment of being caught lovesick worth it.

Gansey didn’t wait to be asked to help out somewhere else before he was slipping into the background, leaving Ronan to pine hopelessly over Adam Parrish all alone.

  
That day’s main task at the bakery was an order by a mother who wanted the trans flag on a vanilla buttercream cake for her son who recently came out. And Ronan was, in his own way, excited about it, even the evidence of it was minimal on his face. Orders like these were the reason why he continued to run the bakery, the reason why he would go through and hell back to keep the establishment open despite sometimes, when the memory of his father sneaks in and the greive starts to settle again deep beneath his septum, being in the kitchen revolted him beyond death.

Ronan asked for Adam’s help with it. _Alone_.

Blue gave him an unimpressed look as she placed the daily batch of raspberry scones in the oven for the cafe patrons to have with their morning coffee, Gansey failing to seem casual as he asked a million questions behind the science of baking, “Your bias is showing, boss.”

Ronan told her to shut the fuck up not unkindly and she only flipped him off in response, giving Adam a fistbump as he made his way towards Ronan at the isolated work table.

Okay maybe Ronan didn’t have the most unselfish reasons for pulling away Adam from register duty but he was running back to Boston in a week’s time and Ronan had to be near him or die trying.

Icarus and the sun. A million warning signs couldn't keep Ronan away.

The cake itself was simple enough to make, a quick recipe Aurora had him memorise before he even turned ten. Beside him, Adam whipped up the eggs, butter and sugar into a sickly sweet frosting to go on top as Ronan placed the frozen cake in between them, already crumb coated before lunch time rolled around and they would be forced to take dining in orders from students and businessmen dropping in from break.

“How is she by the way?” Adam asked solemnly over the noisy sound of the electric whisk. The way he fidgeted and the angle he bent his back over the three bowls told Ronan he had been dying to ask about Aurora since the day he went back to the Barns.

“Alive and still kissing my ouchies,” Ronan snarked while pointing to his heart, offering Adam a shark-toothed grin which Adam returned with a small twitch of his lip, a silent offering to keep the conversation casual, “She wants you over for dinner though.”

Adam goes silent then, picking up the speckle tool to smooth out the buttercream evenly around the entire cake, now in dyed in different colours. Ronan watched intently as Adam trapped his bottom lip in between his teeth, concentrating all his motor skills onto the task to think something over before answering. Wondering about the guilt that was eating him alive for leaving Aurora too.

The layers of icing swirl and swirl as Adam turned the cake stand, the pink, white and blue forming a marble pattern under Adam’s hands the further he worked on the design.

“Looks good,” Ronan commented, helping out by steadying Adam at the elbow as he begun to pipe the boy’s name in dark blue icing, neat little curves just as rigid as Adam felt underneath his palm.

“I’ll come over.”

Ronan chose not to comment on the break in Adam’s voice, could see the struggle on Adam’s face, the way he sounded when he swallowed his pride a melodic chime Ronan had always considered a victory. 

He nodded instead, smeared a line of pink buttercream on Adam’s forehead, and added the different coloured flowers onto the brim of the cake without another word.

They don’t talk about the weight of Adam’s promise or his nerves for the rest of the day.

Ronan came in to check on the bakery or handle paperwork or even bake large orders on most days. He wasn’t obliged to, not when he had Henry to handle finances and knew he could trust his other workers on his life. He just loved the bakery. Every inch of the building had Aurora’s presence and her love seeping from the wood, the gentleness of the place and its ability to slow down time was a stress reliever even though Ronan was technically at work.

So he came in most days.

Except Sundays, when he had mass in the morning and dedicated the rest of the day to family, whether it meant going to see the ducks with Matthew or teaching Opal how to milk goats at the Barns with Maura.

His mother had asked him to come over for dinner that particular Sunday, and Ronan would have agreed, with how Adam had accepted the invitation yesterday, but his firecracker of a daughter had landed herself in the principal’s office again for misconduct.

Ronan was, admittedly, proud.

Gansey was mortified when Ronan told him why he’d be busy the next day, but overall unsurprised when his eyes flickered between Ronan and Opal in his arms, shrugging in defeat as he continued to brush his teeth. He offered to look after Cabeswater while Ronan was absent. Ronan chose not to comment how the bakery could run smoothly on its own and let him knock himself the fuck out, only mildly weirded out his best friend had a humliating crush on his soon-to-be step-sister.

So now Ronan walked through the school gymnasium, inhaling the rubbery smell of deflated balls and poorly mopped floors that attacked him at once. The humidity clouding around his palms and causing his neck to sweat.

Beside him, Adam smiled pleasantly at the teachers waving them over, because he promised Opal Adam would come with him and not because he wanted Adam there with him (e _ven though he really did_ ). With his rolled up button up and firm handshake, looking very much like the poster boy of good parenting even though Ronan was convinced between the two of them, Adam had a bigger habit of spoiling Opal rotten.

Ronan looked ridiculously as Opal’s guardian next to him. Adam only grabbed him by the wrist in silent support.

Opal waved at them too, all crooked teeth, as Ronan jogged up to scoop her up, Adam walking calmly after them.

“Come here you fucking troublemaker,” Ronan whispered muffled into her hair to avoid scrutiny from her teachers that were lurking nearby. Adam shakes his head, an amused grin threatening to break out on his lips, before pressing a firm kiss to Opal’s forehead too, earning him a delighted squeal from the little girl.

“Mr Lynches?” A teacher asks in that infuriatingly polite tone that made Ronan hate talking to teachers in highschool. Nothing much has changed since then.

Both Adam and Ronan turn their heads as if they were both being called. As if they both shared the last name _Lynch_ \- Adam blushes and pulls his hand away from Ronan like he’s been scaled, aware about how they might seemed while Ronan shot out of his hazy dream scenario at seeing how comfortable Adam was being called Mr Lynch, scowling and wishing he hadn’t pulled away so quickly.

“Oh no, we aren't-” Ronan cleared his throat, feeling his ears burning up as he avoided look at Adam’s direction who was trying to justify their casual touching, “We aren't uh _married_.”

The teacher, one who Ronan never bothered to remember the name of, covered in her mouth in scrambled apology, “It’s just you two looked so- Nevermind. Evening my name’s Miss Honey, thank you so much for taking time out of your respective days to discuss Opal’s recurring… behaviour…”

Ronan blocked out the rest of the words coming out of her mouth as he played footsie with Opal who sat in his lap and watched how intently Adam spoke to the teacher with that business-like look on his handsome face, like he was Opal’s father too.

“Did you pay any attention to the meeting at all, Lynch?” Adam asked as he slid into the passenger seat of the beemer after securing Opal behind with her seat belt.

“Nope,” Ronan replied, popping the p at the end with a shark grin. Adam sighed with exasperation, rolling his eyes, but the corners of his lips still tugged upwards in mischief.

Opal boo’d at him too, slotting between their seats despite being trapped into her chair, just to high five Adam. Ronan gave her a betrayed look, grumbling under his breath about being tagged teamed and betrayed by his own flesh and blood.

“Ungrateful, after all I’ve done for you? Changed your diapers? Take you to every shitty capitalistic Disney movie in theaters? The nerve, I betrayed Marx for you!”

“Maybe you shoulda’ thought about that before you adopted me.”

Adam snorted at that as Ronan turned to shove her cap over her eyes playfully. The Virginian sun was warm but notunbearing as it bathed them in golden light despite the autumn weather. The BMW feeling more alive than it had been ever since his father died and the Lynch brothers never rode together in the same vehicle again. Ronan didn’t turn on the stereo, in fear of the music drowning out Adam’s pretty laugh.

“Jesus Lynch, you’re her father and I still managed to be more responsible.”

Ronan bit his tongue to stop himself from saying Adam could be her father too if he wanted, instead sticking his tongue out at the other man like a child as he tried to focus on the road. “Don’t fucking use the lord’s name in vain like that, Parrish.”

They drive to skating rink because Adam was as bad at saying no to Opal as Ronan was.

Or, he was evidently _worse_ since the first thing Adam does there was buy Opal her own pair of rollerblades instead of renting a pair like everyone else.

Ronan gave him an amused look as he crouched down on his knees to help Opal try out the different ones that she likes, five boxes stacked beside her on the red pleather chair.

“You know she won’t use them ever again, right?”

“Shut up, I have the money for it, consider it a congratulations present for being a hooligan like her father,” Adam sniped back as he laced up the second pair of skates, this time a holographic finish to the shoes. Opal checks them out in the mirror, wobbling a bit as she tried to find her balance, Adam swooping in to catch her by the underarms before she could land on her face. “And since when do you think before spending cash, anyways?”  
  
“Since never, daddy’s money has me set for life.”

Adam gaze Ronan a grimace behind Opal’s back, pretending to gag on his finger, “Remind me to put you on my list of rich upper class men I would guillotine first during the inevitable class wars.”

Ronan sticks his tongue out him again, mimicking his words like a brat just to see Adam smile his bemused grin.

Opal rolls her eyes at both of them, announcing she was going with a matte black pair of Impala skates, their wheels a classic cherry red. Adam teases Ronan for her inheriting her taste from him. Ronan replies by saying he has great taste, suggestively dragging his gaze up and down Adam’s body only _semi-jokingly_.

Adam flushes and shoves him forward to the main rink.

They skate for three hours max because Opal had too much energy and Adam and Ronan barely had any left.

It was a comical sight because none of them had any ability to skate, which meant Opal was clutching onto Adam for dear life as Adam clutched onto Ronan, cursing mildly scary threats if Ronan dragged him down, as Ronan clutched onto the rails like a toddler just learning how to walk.

It was only an hour in, when Opal was confident enough to skate on her own, and parted off to skate with the children’s group currently lead by an enthusiastic employee. That left Adam and Ronan alone again, a dangerous combination for everyone else and themselves.

Usually, when Opal was distracted, Ronan would be scouring for a seat, perfectly content to watch his daughter from the sidelines without accidentally bashing his face into the floor. But Adam, who didn’t often partake in activities like these, clutched onto his hand and asked him to stay.

So of course Ronan did.

Despite having some history with ice skating as little boys with his brothers, he was still forced to go slowly and attach himself to Adam for balance. Not that Ronan was complaining about any excuse to hold Adam’s hand.

So they skated together, closer than friends should be. Ronan closed his eyes, let himself be pulled into Adam’s arms, pretending they were alone on the polished floors with multicoloured lights flashing around them and a synth beat from a pop song drowning their heartbeats, and not in a sweaty public establishment surrounded by the cramp bodies of teenagers on dates.

The song fades into something slower, the lights change into soft a blue hue that only managed to make Adam’s eyes peering up at him even more starry.

Two slow dancers.

Ronan doesn’t fight it, let himself be pulled closer, trying not to let his feet slip from underneath him in nervousness. Adam smiled shyly up at him and Ronan tried not to kiss him, a silent request not to let him go.

As if Ronan could ever let Adam go.

It was playing with fire, dancing with the devil, every dangerous and reckless decision known to man. Ronan bearing himself out like this, honest without saying anything, a lamb ready for slaughter as he slotted his body against Adam.

They've done this before. Barefoot in one of the emptier barns when they were seventeen, when there was something electrical and almost hopeful between them. Adam's hearing ear pressed against Ronan's heartbeat, Ronan's chin perched on top of Adam's mess of hair.

Ronan had promised to never let him go then too. They didn't keep their promises then.

His palms were sweaty but Adam still took it between their chests, swaying around lazily rather than skating in rounds just like everyone else was doing. Ronan tried not think about how they looked to others right now, not when he never cared much about the opinions of other people. All he focused on was how Adam looked to him right now, buzzing like a lighthouse in the middle of an earth shattering storm, promising safety and comfort. Not much different from the boy he cared so much about it hurt.

Ronan only had a couple of inches on Adam, meaning he didn't even have to put his effort craning his neck down for them to brush lips.

_It would be so easy._

The moment seemed so right, existing in their own universe. Adam’s eyes almost seemed like they were fluttering close. Their bodies collided like a gaseous explosion in outta space even if their movements were careful and slow.

Ronan wanted to kiss him like he’s been waiting to all his life-

A voice on the stereo system announces the end of the slow dance in an irritatingly chipper voice, the lights start flashing rapidly again, Opal is tugging at his shirt to get them off the rink because she was hungry for pizza.

Adam ducks away and keeps his distance as they skated to the mini diner on the side, blush noticeable on his cheeks even in the pink light.

They get pizza and sit around a sticky table, complaining about the blandness of it and Ronan boasting about how he could make a better one in his sleep and how Adam should come over sometime so Ronan can put his money where his mouth is.

Adam listens attentively to Opal gushing about the techniques she’s learnt today with the junior group, how she was excited to come back and maybe practice her balance at the Barns where there was way more space than Ronan’s apartment. Ronan watched the fondness on Adam’s face bloom as Opal thanked him for the shoes, the blush that reached her ears when she kissed him on the cheek in gratitude.

Ronan has never been more gutted in his life. 

Ronan wasn’t a person who really _wanted_ . At least not the type of person who wanted like Adam _wanted_. Adam wants were familiar to him, to escape, to rebuild, to fix. His mechanic hands that used to run over Ronan’s buzzcut revealed his secrets without words while still remaining untouchable and distant. Ronan was almost the opposite, how much he didn’t accept any form of receiving. 

He wanted Adam Parrish though. More than he’s ever wanted anything more in his life.

He wasn’t used to it. The wound of need that Adam had sliced into him was reopening and gapping but Ronan didn’t have the supplies to stitch back close. He wonders if Adam’s surgeon and mechanic hands could fix him up again without Ronan having to tell him _why_ the damage was so deep.

The want was all consuming, a forest fire that he lived with.

 _I don’t think I know what I want anymore_ , Adam had told him a week ago. Confessed to him like Ronan was a priest when Adam was holier than him without ever uttering a single prayer.

Ronan already knew what he wanted and he already knew he couldn’t have it.

So why did he keep running back to Adam as if Adam didn’t create the gap between them in the first place?

Maybe it was an addiction. Ronan was an expert at developing them, with the way his mouth was constantly plagued by liquor even though he wanted nothing more than to puke it all out. Adam smiled at him from across the table while amusing Opal. Ronan felt anger but he didn’t know where it was directed at, only allowing it to simmer underneath his wraps until he’d burst.

It wasn’t fair how close everything he’s ever wanted was right in front of him.

He shut off his brain to watch his daughter and the boy he loved create an earthquake behind his ribs without even knowing it.

Adam tilts his head Ronan’s way, his eyes so full of something Ronan didn’t dare to name it was unbearable. Maybe it was the tender way Adam treated Opal, like his own daughter, or the memory of how close Adam had been. How reachable he was out on the rink. But Ronan flickered his gaze before he flew straight into the sun, the only reasonable thing he's done all day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idk how to feel about this chapter because it took a bit of effort to push through and its all over the place but we're at the halfway point babeyy (making this twice as long as my other fics :'))


	8. why am i lonely for a lonesome love

Ronan first exposed Adam to the joys of stress baking when they were sixteen.

Stress baking was a strange hobby to put with Ronan Lynch’s angry snarl, menacing and cruel. Strangers would assume his favourite vices involved more gasoline and cheap dented beer cans thrown into car park bonfires. And they wouldn’t be wrong, those were Ronan’s preferred vices.

But he also took comfort in this, the late night without another soul awake in this shit town, the humming of wildlife roaming outside undisturbed, the melodic rhythm of his wooden spoon hitting against the glass mixing bowl in psychedelic rounds.

So they were two sixteen year old boys when Adam woke both of them up in the fit of a nightmare, kicking up Ronan’s (which had also become Adam’s) comforter onto the dirty floor of Ronan’s childhood bedroom.

Ronan, who wasn’t a stranger to nightmares impossible to defeat, dragged Adam down the stairs in secretive steps by the wrist to the Barn’s homey kitchen.

Adam was heaving when awoke with a startle but by the time they were pouring the batter into the metal tin, his breath had become laboured. Ronan kept an eye on him even as he pretended he didn’t care. He was calm when the angel cake came out of the oven in Ronan’s mittened hands. They ate the cake straight from the tin with their hands while sitting in silence on the kitchen counter, refusing to speak about it.

They were stress baking again, now at the age of twenty eight and twenty nine respectively. Angel cake as per tradition, the scent of vanilla suffocating Ronan’s less than impressive apartment kitchen.

It was still dark outside the window when Ronan woke up to Adam in his kitchen, cracking eggs into a large bowl, the other man coming over just the previous night, claiming it would be easier if they made the travel to the Barns together. Ronan heard the silent request in his trembling voice, knew how nervous Adam was for today and how he wouldn’t be able to sleep fretting over it all on his own, and let him in. Like he always will.

He stood at the kitchen door, watching with amusement at the almost medical way Adam worked on his own, with no one to banter with to keep the tension out of his shoulders.The care he showed in the form of careful attention, a freaky fucker with a sharp eye.

Ronan snickers as Adam huffs, frustration burning in his eyes as he burned all his pent up energy with Ronan’s whisk (a part of the expensive set of cookery Gansey had gotten him for Christmas Eve). Startled and almost shattering the rest of the eggs when he finally notices Ronan awake too.

“Can’t sleep, Parrish?” Ronan teases, eyeing the ingredients set up on the kitchen island. Angel cake. Adam nodded sheepishly, scooting over to make space for Ronan by his side without having to be asked.

Ronan willed his heartbeat not to drop into the pit of his stomach, wondering just how many angel cakes Adam had made on his own in the kitchen of his Boston home. How he must’ve thought of Ronan when he did.

Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch were two separate stubborn dogs that functioned as one singular machine.

And like any other machine, even the ones rusty from long periods of no use, they had a system. Adam always handled the wet ingredients because he actually gave a shit about measurements and making sure no one had egg shells in their desserts as a surprise treat, while Ronan made it a point that he didn’t give much of a shit as long as the end product didn’t look like a fucking mess, throwing in ingredients to his liking by judgement alone.

Adam chastised him for dumping in the whipped cream without weighing it first, even though they both knew Ronan could make angel fucking cake in his goddamn sleep, the corners of his pretty mouth curling up with his desaturated hair falling in his eyes.

It was distracting to see him like this. Worse than in the morning light where there were eyes to see and stop him. Someone to take accountability over his yearning, a person with common sense that could snap him out of his worshipping trance reserved for Henrietta-born Adam Parrish and his straight teeth.

Opal wasn’t here because she wanted to spend the whole weekend with her grandmas, and that meant Ronan didn’t really have much self control.

Adam Parrish, only in his ratty boxers and sleep shirt which Ronan often drooled on when they slept next to each other, looking every part the teenage wet dream Ronan hated him for when Gansey first started forcing all of them to hang out together at Nino’s after school.

“Why the fuck are you stressed? Didn’t you already get your overpriced piece of paper from med school?”

Adam scowled at him as he poured the mixture into the baking tin, probably irritated that Ronan was distracting him from his precise ethical practice. Whatever. The least he can do as a last minute guest is pay attention to Ronan as Ronan tries to ignore the Adam Parrish shaped hole pulsing and propagating in his heart. Alive and alive and alive again.

“I just- Don’t you realise how guilty I am for just leaving like that? I was terrified you’d hate me when I came back!” Adam sounded hysterical, twisting his head to avoid looking at Ronan while Ronan tried to guess all the secrets hidden on his obscured face, “Then you didn’t… but I’m terrified Aurora will.”

Honesty was a very strange language coming out of Adam’s mouth, no matter how many confessions Adam had gifted him throughout their lives. Ronan doesn’t comment on Adam’s soft outburst, knows it's not what the other man wants from him without being told it is. He opens up the oven and allows himself to burn by proximity alone. Adam doesn’t say anything either, crouching by Ronan’s side, close enough for their arms to press flushed together, hotter than the oven’s heat.

He slides the cake onto the top rack. Ronan turns the dials to lower the heat. They let the hot air breathe onto their faces for a moment in silent comfort before Ronan slams the oven door close.

Ronan gave him space to wallow and worry. It was how Adam processed things he didn’t want to, the same way Gansey suffered panic attacks when he got too insecure. Just like collecting old family recipes, Ronan was a connoisseur of befriending eccentric, anxious men, and thus was a fucking genius when it came to calming them down like terrified animals

Calling Adam a coward for avoiding Aurora in guilt was a disservice to who Adam was as a person. Ronan knew he wasn’t a coward. Just too practical. A man born with a civil war raging inside of him since birth. No different than Ronan. It was nobody’s fault that Adam had been raised to assume every adult hated him for just existing.

But Adam Parrish was and always will be Aurora Lynch’s favourite stray. She was heartbroken when he left, but unlike her second son, she never got angry about it. She would love him more for every mile he was away, would love him from across the Atlantic Ocean or even if he went to the moon.

Everybody always said Ronan was an uncanny carbon copy of his late father. As he washed the dishes next to Adam at the sink, longing more and more for the other man the closer they approached their due date, he didn’t have a doubt he was his mother’s son.

“Don’t be fucking stupid, Parrish,” He whispered in assurance, melting again like candle wax when Adam turned to him, soap suds on his shirt and soft smile grazing his lips. “Who said I don’t fucking hate you?” He adds just to be an ass. 

Adam splashes dirty dish water all over him, Ronan dumps water down the collar of his shirt. The both of them cackling like boys should as they make a mess of Ronan’s nice kitchen floor.

They barely catch a wink of sleep by the time they pulled into the front seats of the beemer. Ronan cursed at Adam for waking him up at the ass crack of dawn (which meant nine am with limited sleep in his book) and Adam helplessly groaning in reply, shielding his eyes from the blinding sun.

Adam slammed his head into the car seat headrest, the angel cake carefully placed in his lap, as Ronan turned the ignition, kicking up gravel as they sped the drive to the Barns.

  
Ronan had driven down this road with Adam in his passenger seat for years. When he drove Adam to and from the Barns without a choice, it was expected that Ronan roll down the windows and blasted his music loud enough that the electronic thumping distracted both of them from idle small talk.

It was calm in the form of controlled chaos, a hurricane they chose willingly. The sound pumps in place of Ronan’s heartbeat as Adam perched his chin on the car window, coarse hair blowing in the wind and wearing a large sweater in place of his old mechanic overalls, the green endless hills of Henrietta waving as they sped by.

The roads sang along with the cicadas under the beemer’s worn out wheels, Virginia welcoming its golden son home and thanking Ronan for taking him here. Where he belongs. Maybe. In the cool air, surrounded by dense forest, hiding secret waterfalls and shallow creeks. All by Ronan’s side.

He was going to miss him. That was certain. What was uncertain was if Ronan could cope being left the second time.

Adam taps a rhythm against the dashboard, a song Ronan’s never heard before. He doesn’t turn to look at Ronan but Ronan tries his hardest to concentrate on the road instead of trying to guess when Adam would twist his head towards him again. Nervousness clouds his expression reflected on the side mirror and Ronan wishes he could swallow it all for him.

Adam, still refusing to meet his eye, falling in love with Henrietta for maybe the first time, extended his hand to the gearshift between them. Took and cage Ronan’s hand in his.

Maybe it was the least cruel thing Adam had ever done to Ronan, leaving without a warning. Taking out all the anxiety from the equation.

War. Ronan didn’t know whether to lock the feeling of Adam’s rough palm into his memories or retreat his hand onto his lap.

Adam made the decision for him, tightening his grip like Ronan was going to slip from his grasp even though Adam was the one leaving Ronan behind.

Ronan gives Adam a moment alone to drink up the sight of the Barns when they finally pull up in the gravel driveway.

He leaned against the BMW, staying behind as Adam walked up to the doorstep, stretching his neck back to full look at the old rustic building. Running his hand all over the columns and stair railing, his step tentative all over the green grass. Ronan wishes he did pick up smoking in his youth instead of cheap liquor, how he itched for a cigarette between his lips instead of craving something worse. An excuse to stay outside and never see all the things he loved in one place.

Adam had ruined his childhood home for him too. His cologne forever stuck in the Barn’s hardwood whenever Ronan came to visit. The chair at the dinner table, empty, all he’ll be able to think about the next time he returned with Adam already flown to Boston.

But Ronan walks up the steps anyways, knowing that Adam needed him and he was a sucker for giving Adam whatever he needed without questions. He would give him the sun if it didn’t already reside underneath Adam’s ribs.  
“Cat got your balls, Parrish?” Ronan asked just to irritate the other man, taking his hand in his again. Adam shoved him lightly but a small grin wormed its way onto his handsome face, making him look much younger at the Barns. Ronan swallowed, watching as Adam curled his free hand into a fist, knocking slowly on the ancient door.

“Mrs Lynch, as beautiful as ever,” Adam sighs, like his breathing was knocked out of his lungs by the sight of her.

Aurora opens the door, a blinding smile already on her face as she assessed the state of both men from the doorway. She was wearing that meadow green tunic dress, the one with a monet painting embroidered on it, Ronan knew she put on for visitors and piano recitals, her hair messily tied into a white bun on her head topped off with her straw hat.

Her grin goes from excited to endearing in seconds, burying her face into Adam’s chest as she wrapped her frail arms around his waist, Adam not slow behind in returning the favour as he perched his chin on the top of her blonde head.

“Adam Parrish, as charming as ever.”

Ronan doesn’t comment on how he can see tears in his mother’s eyes when it was his turn for a hug, neither does he was anything when Adam was reaching for his hand again when Aurora frantically ushers them indoors.

  
“You’ve grown so much,” Is the first thing Aurora says to Adam once inside the Barns, Adam twisting his head to assess the slight changes to the place since he left. (Mostly being the addition of Maura’s and Opal’s shit lying everywhere around the house.)

Adam nods sheepishly, his cheeks burning red as he squeezed his grip on Ronan’s hand. Ronan grinned wolfishly like the hooligan he is, slapping Adam solidly on the chest.

“Finally a looker, right? Grew out of that fucking ugly haircut.”

His mother, who knew about both his horrible range of vocabulary and his crush on Adam Parrish circa age fifteen to twenty eight and a half, only smiled knowingly as she guided them further to the dinner table.

“Yes, quite handsome, would make a fine son-in-law, no?”

Ronan, feeling flustered, stuttered out a protest while feeling his own blush glaring on his unfortunate pale complexion. Adam snickers at him behind Ronan’s back, smacking his cheek in payback. Ronan flips him the bird in retaliation, attempting to trip him in front of Maura.

“Too bad you don’t have any daughters, then,” Ronan groused at his mother, earning a tap to the top of his head with a wooden spoon.

“I wouldn’t be interested in dating your sister even if you had any!” Adam balked too, just as Ronan’s future step-sister appeared beside them.

“Gee thanks, I approve of your happy communion as the world’s most stinky couple already,” Blue directed at them as she slammed into her seat at the table, earning glares from both men. “What’s for breakfast, moms?” This was directed to Aurora and Maura instead as she popped a piece of blueberry waffle into her mouth.

The dinner table was spread out with a party worth of dishes, ranging from waffles to sausages, egg muffins and sunny side up eggs. Adam took his rightful seat nearest to the window gracefully (the seat that once belonged to a younger Ronan) while Ronan took his place in the seat just next to him (Niall’s old seat next to Aurora). He places the angel cake next to the jar of strawberry jam, Aurora shooting them a knowing look as she thanked them for the gift.

Adam turns to him, fidgeting with Ronan's fingers under the table like piano keys. He kept twisting his head and Ronan understood. The Barns was as much his home as it was the Lynch brother's. The bedroom upstairs, with the unmade bed that belonged to Opal now, a place they spent so many nights curled against each other, staring up at the artificial stars on Ronan's ceilings. The backyard, not far from their favourite creek, where all three Lynches and their honorary brothers, Gansey and Adam, fought in the mud. The garden where Aurora taught Adam that the most beautiful things sprouted from dirt.

The nostalgia was suffocating. Ronan couldn't wrap his head around an adult version of the boy he loved most ardently back here in his heaven of the Barns. A daydream, he couldn't imagine what Adam was feeling right now heading back into the lively haunted house of his past.

He understood so he intertwines his fingers with Adam. Adam gives him a weak smile in return.

Maura drops into the kitchen/dining area, raising a sarcastic eyebrow at her daughter’s rhetorical question, before shifting her attention towards Adam. 

“Maura Sargent, I’ve heard stories about you,” She offers with a kind smile, eyeing the family portrait featuring a much younger Adam posing in front of St Agnes church with the remaining Lynches in their Sunday bests, proudly hung where everyone could see it.

Adam smiled with his straight teeth, amping up the Southern charm as he shook her hand, before laughing mirthfully when Opal lunges towards him and crawls into his lap at the table.

Aurora pours their drinks around the table (hushing Adam when he offers to do it instead, even though Opal refuses to leave her station) before taking her seat between Maura and Ronan, although she reaches her hand out for Adam’s on the table.

Adam lets go of Ronan’s hand in favour of squeezing her’s, making it Ronan’s job to spoon fed both Adam and Opal as neither of them feel like using their hands for eating.

Ronan grumbles under his breath as Adam expectantly opens his mouth for a second serving, letting himself be whisked away by the conversation between Aurora and Maura about his college years. A trail of maple syrup on his chin because he’s a slob and Ronan is a terrible caretaker. 

Reluctant to admit it, the breakfast with one part of his family was nice. No one brought up Adam’s sudden leave, like he was so nervous about, and Blue only teased them for being an old married couple just twice (not counting all the smug looks she shot Ronan from across the table when he was caught staring at Adam’s stupidly handsome side profile). 

Maybe this was the start of something new and meals like these would be more frequent, maybe even with Matthew and Declan present. He could always call Adam down from Boston for Christmas right?

Ronan was starting to think maybe Adam leaving Henrietta once again didn’t have to mean permanently this time. This wasn’t a complete Ending yet.

Something warm and sticky that tasted like hope bubbled on his tongue like the fizzy lemonade in his glass. He wouldn’t have to give Adam Parrish up forever, no matter how selfish the thought sounded even to himself. 

Adam and Blue were excused from dish washing duty early because Opal wanted to show him the chickens in their new coop and Blue was tagging along because she was a traitor and back stabbing gremlin.

Ronan would’ve bolted too, if not for Maura’s stern glare his direction which shifts into a sweet smile when she directs it at an excited, babbling Opal dragging Adam by the wrist outside. Adam gives him a sheepish grin as he abandons alone, turning back to attentively listen to Opal listing all the chicken names.

“How you holdin’ up, little seal?” Aurora asks him as she wipes down the washed dishes next to him, a curious sparkle in her eyes. Maura excused herself, saying she needed to clean up Opal’s permanent room at the Barns

Ronan grunted in reply, knowing exactly what she meant. It didn’t matter how he was feeling right now, not when he was trying hell and back to ignore it all. 

“He’s leaving in a few days,” He says instead, craving sympathy. Knowing his mother would understand how much the thought of Adam leaving him again so soon after coming back into his life and nestling a space in his heart, gutted him with a sharp knife. Carving his insides into mush, twisting with every smile Adam offered him.

Aurora frowns, nods in understanding. She gathers his wet hands in her dry ones, giving space to lean on her.

Ronan accepts her offering, collapsing into her like a young fawn running back to the deer who raised him.

She cups his cheek, trailing a finger along his buzzcut, and presses a kiss to his hairline. Ronan lets himself crumble in his mother’s arms without judgement, knowing in just a few more days he won’t know how to be alive, at least not as fully like the past two weeks. Where would he go if he wasn’t shadowed in the sun’s warmth, swallowing affection until he drowned hazily in Adam Parrish’s warm palm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wanted to add much more to this, like nostalgia and shit, but it kept me from finishing this chapter so i hope this meets expectations ?????


	9. meet me at blue diner

Five days leading up to Adam’s departure, Ronan avoided every calendar in his line of sight at all cost.

He shoves the ugly piece of shit, the one he got for free from the mail, the one he reluctantly placed on his office desk just to take note of his catering dates, at the bottom of the drawer. It taunted him whenever he sat there to work, only to look up and see Adam and his sad smile towering over him, asking him out to lunch, knowing he’ll have to treasure the gentleness of his voice deeper than the bottom of his desk drawer.

Four days leading up to Adam’s departure, he had convinced Blue to handle all his reminders, not without protest and her grumbling about being his personalised secretary.

She gave him an exasperated look when he asked, calling him a lazy fucking excuse of a step brother, although her shoulders slumped at the almost pathetic pleading look he was giving her. She didn't know Ronan was avoiding time like it existed only to personally break his heart. He refused to acknowledge why a sharp pain kept occurring at random intervals in his chest.

_ Anything to avoid reminding himself he was going to lose his other half again. A part of his ribs moving back across the state. Too many miles away to be reassuring. _

(Adam didn’t make it easy though, not when he went out of his way to fetch Opal from school or the Barns along with Ronan every evening after work even if his motel resided the other direction. 

Ronan found it cruel he was going to make Opal suffer alongside Ronan, mourning him and his hollow absence. He also found his heart could never oppose the idea of Adam waving to Opal from the school gates, looking happier than Ronan’s ever seen him as boys.)

Three days leading up to Adam’s departure, Adam shows up on his doorstep, still in his work apron with a shy smile on his face.

“You never taught me how to make Aurora’s apple pie, remember loser?” Was his explanation as he shimmed his way into the doorway, his chest pressing against Ronan as he made his way inside.

And Ronan stood dumbfound, finding him fucking ridiculous showing up at his house in the middle of the fucking night to bake some goddamn apple pie when he could’ve asked Aurora herself just a few days ago.

Ronan doesn’t comment on it, taking his place by Adam’s side as the other man pulled bowls and utensils from the cupboards like it was his own kitchen.

In another timeline it could have been.  _ Their kitchen _ . A place where the three of them would have breakfast together every morning and dinner together every night. 

And it could've been their bedroom. And there could've been their garden but it was really just Adam's, sitting on the window still, growing despite the cold weather. And it could've been their parent-teacher nights. And there could've been their bakery.

Ronan tries not to think about it as he helped a drowsy but still eager Adam pour the flour into the biggest bowl in his house that was still clean.

They had always been good at sharing as boys.

They take a break from baking as the pie sits in the oven. Ronan sometimes wondered if Adam messied himself in flour on purpose, with the way it always got stuck between the strands of his summer hair and powdering over his freckles on his cheek.

They sat on the kitchen counter (after Adam had insisted to wipe it down, they weren't hooligans,  _ Lynch _ ) close enough until their elbows pressed together. It felt electric and the most easiest thing Ronan had ever done, seeping Adam's warmth from that small area where their skin melted together.

They were facing the window, staring ahead like the scene was beautiful and worth looking at when really it was just dark and empty outside. Ronan would rather turn his head and stare at someone really worth his gaze. The thought made his head pound so of course he didn't.

“Do you remember that night?” Adam says and it shatters the silence. Ronan finally twists his head to face him, bracing himself to double over in defeat as his breath knocks out of his lungs. Adam was looking back. How long had he been looking first?

Ronan remembered many nights. Some he wishes he didn't. So he shrugs and watches Adam blink slowly up at him, a glossy look in his eyes that made his irises look like a place worth drowning in.

“The week before I left.”

There were many nights they spent together during the week before Adam left. Mourning his departure before he was even gone. And yet Ronan knew exactly which night he was talking about. 

The sudden mention of it, Adam bringing it up so casually as if it wasn’t the worst thing they've ever done together, made Ronan exhale sharply. The memory of it attacking all his senses at once. It was very difficult to keep looking at Adam's open face, eyebrows turned and lips parted with his heavy breath, even though it was Ronan’s favourite thing to do.

Adam doesn't comment on the thin air in the room so neither does Ronan. His hand rests above Ronan’s on Ronan’s thigh, his thumb drawing circles in his skin. Ronan didn't have to say a word for Adam to know he did remember and it was all he could think about for as long as they've been apart.

Eleven years was a hell of a time to regret one night.

“I never told anyone,” Adam whispered, leaning in to tell Ronan and no one else, not allowing even the universe to know their secret, “Just like we promised.”

Ronan nodded, feeling too many things at once too late at night to really understand if the spike in his heart rate was from fear or adrenaline. It didn't matter, Adam was pulling away to remove the pie from the oven, turning his face away like he was still this unknowable teenager that was a magician at hiding his suffering.

Ronan catches a glimpse of his frown, just as handsome as his grins and his sneers, in the mirror of the oven. Adam must've forgotten he was shit at hiding anything from Ronan, who worshipped him so wickedly he noticed even the smallest twitch in his facade.

They watch a movie while waiting for the pie to cool, then they eat the pie while continuing the shitty action film at the lowest volume so Opal didn't suddenly wake up from the noise.

Adam comments on how good it is with his mouth stuffed, staring at Ronan with stars shining in the blue tv reflection in his eyes. Ronan threatens to rat him out to Aurora for liking his pie better. Adam sticks his tongue out at him like a child. Ronan tries not to think about how sweet his tongue would be in his mouth.

They lay on the couch, sluggish and full from splitting a decently sized apple pie between two people. There were leftovers of course, Adam wordlessly placed them in the fridge for Opal and the rest of Cabestwater’s employees tomorrow.

Ronan pats on his stomach and burps just to see Adam flinch. He does and kicks Ronan playfully in return. Ronan calls him a fucking motherfucker just to see Adam laugh openly, head thrown back, throat bared, hair bouncing. 

Ronan grins, all sharp and teasing up at him and tugs Adam back down onto the couch in the middle of his laughing fit.

The other man lands on top of him, eyes wide and glossy again. Ronan’s eyes snatched at his parted lips, his hands splayed at Adam's ribs to keep him from falling flat on Ronan. A lightning bolt strikes through Adam's chest and lands a hole through Ronan’s pulsing heart.

“Go out with me tomorrow,” Adam spluttered, a strange thing coming from his usually calm and collected mouth.

It was such a sudden thing for him to say that Ronan stared up at him in confusion while his body hummed in interest, jaw slack and legs awkwardly pinned underneath Adam's solid weight, nodding without thinking.

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Adam repeated, exhaling around the word.

Two days before Adam's departure, they go on a date.

Except Ronan isn't really sure if it was a date or not.

Adam had asked him at a stupid late time, almost breaching one am, and he seemed to have forgotten since he woke up in Ronan’s bed. Ronan almost wished he didn't remember.

Ronan didn't dare bring it up all day with Opal around but Adam dragged him to his own room and forced him to get changed the moment they got home from sending her to the Barns, a scheming grin on his handsome face.

And they did things that they already did together. Bullying each other on their clothing choice, Adam gently grabbed him by his chin to help him shave his stubble cleaner, drive in the BMW into town to some shitty place called Blue Diner. And the looking. The stolen glaces, driving Ronan crazy as he slowly forgot he wouldn't have these moments anymore in less than forty eight hours.

Ronan squirmed in the seat opposite of Adam, trying to focus on his menu instead of the way Adam had nicely combed up his hair and put on cologne along with his nice button down like he was going on a date. (Was this a date?) Ronan desperately wanted to ask but couldn't push the words any further than his teeth.

So instead he says Adam looks stupid eventhough he thought Adam looked nicer than Adam's usual nice, mature and cleaned up, sexy in a different way from his old ruggered tired teenager smudged in gasoline on a shitty second hand motorbike look in highschool. Handsome in that very smart med school graduate way. Ronan felt a flair of something hot in his stomach that felt close to anger at the sight of him, one that made him feel like picking a fight.

He bit hard on his bottom lip instead, scratching on the wooden table and tearing up the diner’s napkins when Adam rolled his eyes smoothly at him.

Adam ordered waffles with maple syrup and ice cream along with fries even though it was already evening time so of course Ronan ordered the exact thing just to annoy him. Adam rolls his eyes again, says nothing with his lips pressed into an amused smile, and dips his fry into his ice cream to feed Ronan.

Catching up on their respective lives was always a strange feeling for either man. The way it felt like talking to a photograph from the past, buried in the shadows and caked by dust but loved so carefully it was barely torn at the edges.

Ronan talked about Opal more openly, boasting at how proud he was of her and how terrified he would fuck up raising her, and Adam shared about his dissociative episodes at college, a confession that made Ronan upset Adam never called not because it was a shitty thing to do but because it meant Ronan couldn't be there to help him. 

It still felt like a date but the casual way they knew each other contradicted the feeling. It was just them hanging out alone like old times but this time there was something about Adam that was glimmering like a recently erupted milky way.

Ronan hadn't been on many dates before, not even after Adam had left, too busy with Opal and the bakery to have space left to care about anyone else. But no date has ever ruined him like this.

They were there for almost an hour when there was a sudden lull in the conversation, the silence comfortable between them. Ronan was teasing Adam about Gansey's crush on him with a horribly posh and off impression of their friend. Adam snorted and bursted into laughter anyways and they snickered about it like school boys until they were breathless even if it wasn't all that funny.

They didn't say anything else because there was nothing else to be said. Adam was just looking at Ronan like he always had but it was different, warmer, spring blooming in his cheeks and flowers sprouting from the swimming pools in his eyes.

The streetlight filtered through the barely polished window, rays of artificial sunshine hitting through the strands of Adam’s hay coloured hair. His teeth aligned like little tombstones marking the place a younger Ronan Lynch had died, killed by that charming smile on his lips.

Ronan didn't know how he looked then, only knew it was probably impossible to hide how much he wanted to kiss the other man.

The thought of this being a date entered Ronan’s mind again and this time it was harder to ignore with Adam staring at him like that from across the table.

And if it really was a date, they sure were doing things weirdly.

Nial Lynch had been a very charming man. He had wooed Ronan’s mother and her soft heart since the beginning, offering her words just as gentle as she was and was the textbook gentleman. Aurora spoke in the memory of him very fondly and Ronan never really understood the romantic side of his father.

He was the golden Lynch brother, a carbon copy of Nial Lynch and his dog snarl and piercing blue eyes and beautiful disaster of a mind.

This softness, the easiness and charm that came with formality, was the only trait he didn't inherit. (It was Declan’s heirloom, a curse as much as it was a gift.)

And this was probably the only time in his entire life he wished he was born with some sort of social consciousness.

Dating was for strangers. Adam, taking his hand from across the table and telling him about the night he cried on Ronan’s birthday, looked like a familiar stranger. But the way he pressed his knees against Ronan’s and kicked his shoes underneath the sticky white table made it clear they knew each other too well to forget.

There was a fire and Ronan was staring right at it, unblinking and waiting to burn along with its brightness. The fire smiles shyly at him from across the table and tucks his neatly cropped hair behind his freckled ears. Ronan takes a sip from the milkshake they shared in the centre of the table to extinguish the sunlight inside of him.

It was getting late. Adam offered to pay even though Ronan had already reached for the bill, scoffing at Adam with practiced indifference. They stepped outside when it was settled and Adam suggested a walk in the park. 

Ronan rolled his eyes, his face turning pink when Adam took his hand.

_ It was always quiet at night in Henrietta, even when Adam was around sleeping under Ronan’s star wars bed sheets. The town slept at an appropriate time, even Aglionby boys couldn’t stay up partying forever. _

Sitting at the steps of a nearby tennis court in the cold night, Ronan has never felt more warm.

Ronan stared up at the sky, desperately searching for a shooting star to pray to, rubbing his hands desperately against each other as puffs of cold breath left his lungs.

Warmth in the image of Adam Parrish obstructs his vision, eyebrows neutrally drawn and charming twitch on his lips, looking kind in reality but cruel in Ronan’s mind with how much he wanted him.

“Can I sit here?” He asks, taking up the space by Ronan’s side before Ronan could grunt a reply in agreement.

They sat in silence on the concrete steps, staring at the same sky and the same moon, arms brushing as they subtly huddled for warmth in the form of each other.

Nights like these were fragile and Ronan didn’t know how to handle fragile things. His hands were too rough and even with gentleness, the fire burning under his skin would always turn things into ashes. He didn’t know how to treat things as prone to damage as he is.

Sometimes Ronan felt like this was all he would ever be allowed, skin brushing whether accidental or not. Adam maybe back but that didn’t mean he was no longer circulating a different dimension than Ronan. Untouchable. Running away even though he was right there beside him.

A hand reaches for his again, gentle fingernails trailing the veins on the back of his hand like Henrietta roads and invisible leylines. Ronan felt velvet as their flesh melted against each other. He turned his palm upwards like in prayer, capturing Adam’s fingers in his own in a desperate attempt to get him to stay. Trying to fetter a god to a town he no longer wanted to see again.

Selfishness. All consuming as he drank Adam’s affection greedily like a dog lapping up wine at the altar. Ronan had never been the most holy of worshippers. But he was definitely the most devout.

Tilting his head, he tried to watch Adam from the corner of his eye, an art he’d mastered since he was a boy. The melancholy on Adam’s handsome face as he studied the stars like they held the same answers Ronan was searching for. Another vulnerable gift god has given him that he didn’t know how to approach.

Adam turned his head too, like he knew Ronan was watching him because he always fucking knew things he had no right knowing. His eyes flicker down and Ronan tries not to drown. Try to pretend he didn’t notice Adam’s gaze on his lips, still licking away the dryness over his better judgement.

Looking at him now. Adam wasn’t  _ just _ a vulnerable thing. He wasn’t beautiful rosary beads made from porcelain Ronan was terrified of slipping out of his sweaty hands and shattering onto a parking lot outside his church.

Adam was resilient. Not something created for the sake of ruining, unlike what he was raised to believe. An ocean tide with enough current to drown the world in his storm and rival Ronan’s own hellfire. He wasn’t the porcelain made to shatter, but the porcelain tiles Ronan bruised his knees kneeling on for a miracle.

Ronan felt electric. A martyr ready for a sacrifice. 

“Remember that night? When you asked me what I was doing in Henrietta? And I told you I didn’t know what I wanted anymore?”

Ronan nodded nervously, every cell in his body vibrating. They were already sitting skin to skin, closer than they had any right being, but he could still feel Adam shifting even closer. Anticipation. A volcano ready to erupt. A grenade made to destroy, waiting to finally explode.

“I know what I want now.”

And then Adam’s kissing him.

For the second time in his life, Ronan felt sanctified. They were floating, Adam’s mouth on his and his hands on the back of his neck, the other on his hip. Their thighs slotted against each other awkwardly as they tried to kiss sitting right next to each other on the already cramped staircase. It’s all he’s thought about for weeks, all he’s dreamt about for years. Just him, Adam and the moon. Existing solely for themselves. Feeling wanted in return.

And Ronan thinks about the word he never allowed to think about before, even in the comfort of his own mind.

Then Ronan pushed Adam away and scattered off the porch like he'd been burned, leaving Adam dazed and confused in a haze as he blinked down at Ronan with his blue summer eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is unedited and im not as into trc anymore but i guess i owned adam a birthday present (in the form of breaking his heart :/)


End file.
